Red Hat releases Red Hat Satellite 5.6

Now, more than ever, systems management requirements are becoming more complex as a result of increased virtualization and the move towards cloud computing. Red Hat Satellite helps organisations manage these complexities and grow their Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms through powerful management capabilities for system provisioning, patch management, configuration management, and monitoring. A recent study by IDC, sponsored by Red Hat, found that the number of Linux servers managed per admin increased an average of 28 Linux servers per administrator before to 60 per administrator after the deployment of Red Hat Satellite, and reduced annual costs of IT infrastructure by nearly $304,000.[1]

The latest release of Red Hat Satellite helps users better manage their Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure through new capabilities, including better reporting and troubleshooting tools, increased Satellite flexibility and scaling, improved system availability, and enhanced content control and synchronisation. New features in Red Hat Satellite 5.6 include:

Enhanced subscription and system reporting: Red Hat Satellite 5.6 provides incremental levels of reporting which marry existing subscription views with newer reporting capabilities across subscription consumption and hardware details.

Client system service analysis: Red Hat Satellite 5.6 supports aggregation of error and crash information via integration with the client-side reporting tool called ABRT (Automatic Bug Reporting Tool), providing a centralised mechanism to collect and analyse system state information at the time of an application crash on end clients.

Inter-Satellite Sync (ISS) content management and trust refinement: Inter-Satellite Sync allows one Red Hat Satellite instance to pull content from another Satellite instance. With this release, users now have the ability to retain and refine Channel (or repository) access permissions when syncing from one Satellite to another. Administrators of each Satellite in a synchronised exchange now have finer control over access permissions per Satellite, per organisation, and, by extension, per channel.

Red Hat Satellite server hot-backups: The black box embedded database back end will exchange Oracle for PostgreSQL, providing the ability to perform hot-backups when backing up the Satellite server.

Automated provisioning in PXE-less environments: Cobbler Build ISO support has been added to Satellite, enabling automated provisioning in environments without a PXE option via the creation of custom ISOs.

Red Hat Satellite server scalability: Red Hat Satellite now has an installation option for deploying the Satellite admin-managed (embedded) database on a separate Red Hat?Enterprise Linux system, providing significant scaling without requiring the expertise of a DBA.

Choice of external, DBA-managed database: Red Hat Satellite 5.6 offers the option of using either a PostgreSQL or Oracle database for those requiring an external DBA-managed database for scaling, providing choice , if an external DBA-managed database is required.

[1] IDC White Paper, sponsored by Red Hat, Linux Management with Red Hat Satellite: Measuring Business Impact and ROI. August 2013 <https://engage.redhat.com/forms/idc-rhn-satellite>