Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite is Red Hat’s on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring across both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. It offers customers opportunities to gain enhanced performance, centralized control and higher scalability for their systems, while deployed on a management server located inside the customer’s datacenter and firewall.

In September 2009, Red Hat released RHN Satellite 5.3, the first fully open source version of the product. This latest version offers opportunities for increased flexibility and faster provisioning setups for customers with the incorporation of open source Cobbler technology in its provisioning architecture. The 5.3 release is also designed to allow customers to better scale with server growth, offering the ability to manage large numbers of systems with comparable ease to managing one.

Recently, IDC also published a Red Hat-sponsored paper featuring the systems management benefits that customers have experienced with RHN Satellite. After interviewing 10 RHN Satellite customers in depth – crossing geographies and industry verticals — IDC reported significant return on investment (ROI) and productivity results for customers. Here are some of the highlights from the customer testimonials:

• Average of 338% ROI
• Average payback period of 4.8 months
• A doubled increase in the number of Linux servers managed per system administrator
• Average annual benefit of $82,521 per 100 Linux servers
• Average of $23,207 in annual user productivity increase

In their own words, customers quoted in the paper showed that RHN Satellite helped them achieve:

• Enhanced productivity
  “If RHN Satellite Server didn’t exist, I would need another person or more.”
• Scalability
  “…with Satellite Server, once things are set up and it is in place, managing 200 servers is as easy as managing one.”
• Reduced costs
  “For an OS install, we used to hire someone outside to do the work. We would buy the hardware, then we pay them to come on site, answer questions. So now, we are completely avoiding that cost.”
• Faster server setup and management
  “As far as time saving goes, I would say we are easily saving 20 hours per month because we aren’t doing things manually.”
• Business growth
  “In terms of the impact, I always count what we can sell in an hour. If the system is down, we can’t sell and that’s a revenue impact. In just one hour, we might lose millions of euros, so the impact is huge.”

To read the full IDC paper on RHN Satellite, visit here.

To learn more about RHN Satellite, visit here.

Or, to read more about what customers have to say about RHN Satellite, visit here.

The Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite team is pleased to announce the general availability of RHN Satellite and Proxy version 5.3 today. RHN Satellite is Red Hat’s on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring for Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments. RHN Satellite 5.3 includes some of the newest features that were born directly from issue tracker tickets submitted by customers, as well as contributions from the Spacewalk community. Thanks to all, today we’re able to provide the next version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems management platform.

RHN Satellite 5.3 contains many exciting new features that are grouped around three key themes:

• Leveraging and including cutting-edge open source systems management projects such as Cobbler.
• Easier management of larger, complex environments.
• Expanded automation and virtualization capabilities.

Cutting-edge open source systems management projects: Satellite now includes Cobbler provisioning

With the incorporation of more mature open source Cobbler technology in the product’s underlying provisioning architecture, Red Hat provides increased flexibility and faster provisioning setups for Red Hat Network Satellite customers. Leveraging great functionally specific technologies like Cobbler offers customers powerful, feature-rich tools that now plug into a comprehensive common systems management framework, a framework that enhances the value of the subscription of any deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is backed with the commercial support and commitment of Red Hat.

Improving the underlying provisioning architecture of Satellite is a major goal of the Satellite 5.3 release. Cobbler is a Linux installation server that seeks to provide rapid setup of network installation environments. Administrators can use Cobbler to store, manage and automate several aspects of system installation and provisioning, from package installation and channel subscription to DHCP and DNS configuration. We believe that it is fundamentally a better way to provision Linux systems that offers faster and easier setup and maintenance for provisioning infrastructure.

The major advantage of basing Satellite on Project Spacewalk is that the community can now fully participate in its development. Satellite is now more agile when addressing changing market needs and better able to flexibly incorporate new technologies, for example, Cobbler. Red Hat customers now have a direct ability to influence the direction and extension of the Satellite product.

Easier management of larger, complex environments

RHN Satellite includes a significant update to the Multiple Organizations feature, which allows administrators to view, create and manage multiple organizations across the Satellite.

Trust relationships between organizations are now supported, allowing Satellite Administrators to establish mutual connections between two or more organizations. Organizations within a trust can share their custom content channels with each other, provided that the Organization Administrator or Channel Administrator gives access to the custom channel in the channel sharing configuration. Organization Administrators can now migrate systems from one trusted organization to another. The system configuration history (such as entitlements, software and configuration channels and virtual guest associations) are preserved. The destination organization can then configure the system for their purposes.

The benefits from these improvements to the Multiple Organizations feature include:

• More efficient use of disk space due to less duplication, and
• Greater consistency because all shared content is the same (less risk of one organization having a different package set than the other which is particularly helpful with compliance initiative such as PCI and FISMA).

RHN Satellite now features Inter-Satellite Sync support, which allows Satellite Administrators to synchronize channel content from one master Satellite server to one or more slave Satellites, regardless of location. Some of the benefits of this include faster sharing of content between Satellite servers and fewer errors than if content is manually copied.

Expanded virtualization and automation capabilities

Satellite’s Application Programming Interface (API) has been expanded so that practically any command that can be accomplished via the web interface can now be done via the API. RHN Satellite includes virtual platform management capabilities that allow customers to create and entitle Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems on Xen and KVM Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

A major emphasis of this release was to complete the number of APIs so that customers can interact with Satellite outside of the web interface. While using the web interface meets the needs of the majority of customers, we do have customers that want to interact with Satellite via API. Generally these type of customers have large and complex environments, and Satellite is just one part of their systems management infrastructure. They want to call and execute certain actions within Satellite from other tools and scripts, without having to go into the web interface to manually execute these commands. With the 5.3 release of Satellite, many commands in Satellite that can be accomplished via the web interface can now be done via the API, including new calls for the multiple organizations feature, Cobbler installation server and system and errata search. Only the Monitoring module cannot be fully addressable via APIs.

Additionally, Satellite 5.3 enables customers to manage large deployments more easily and with comparable performance to smaller deployments.

With virtualization as a key requirement in many of today’s IT environments, Satellite offers one console that can update, provision and monitor both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. With virtual platform management capabilities that allow customers to create and entitle Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems with the ability to install the same systems profiles physically and virtually in a repeatable, centrally managed way, it frees up administrator’s time to focus on higher value-add projects.

So, there you have the key features available today in RHN Satellite 5.3. There are many other new capabilities that are too numerous to list in this short space. To see a complete list of everything new in Satellite 5.3, be sure to read the release notes.

For more information about systems management, take a look at the Red Hat-sponsored IDC whitepaper that examines the key functions and benefits of system management software in today’s business and enterprise environments.

For additional Satellite 5.3 product information, visit our product pages.

Keeping management simple, standard and flexible has been a central theme in designing and developing our management solutions. Today we are pleased to announce the next major update to our JBoss management solution, JBoss Operations Network (ON). JBoss ON 2.3 is available in conjunction with the availability of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0.

This is a significant update because with the launch of this new platform customers will have access to a comprehensive management solution to help optimize their deployments and get the most out of the modular and flexible platforms.

JBoss ON helps customers move up to the next generation Java application platform confidently using application management that is available for enterprise adoption of the latest Java platform.

Customers that are familiar with JBoss ON in previous JBoss Enterprise Application Platform versions should have the same consistent management experience in their new platforms. Additionally, JBoss ON is designed to manage mixed mode environments seamlessly.

In release version 2.3, JBoss ON has three key features:

1.Discovery, inventory, dependency management, configuration management, application deployment, patch update, deployment and content management, availability and performance management of the application server, JVM, Web connector and virtual host. These capabilities allow JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5 customers to leverage a broad set of management features out of the box to operationalize their deployments without any wait time or additional management software.

2. An API for SOA Platform and Java clients to access a number of features within JBoss ON, such as user/role/group management, inventory search, monitoring, alerting, package deployment and operations execution. With the availability of this new API, customers can now access JBoss ON directly from their existing in house or 3rd party tools, improving interoperability between JBoss and proprietary vendor products and protecting existing infrastructure investments.

3. A Command Line interface that supports secured remote access to the JBoss ON management server and allows for state-ful script execution, and access to all of the API calls remotely through a simplified API calling facility. The full functional CLI helps operations teams to access JBoss ON outside of a GUI console, providing a means to embed JBoss management in custom application management solutions.

This release of JBoss ON comes close on the heels of our version 2.2 release, earlier this summer, which demonstrates our commitment to innovation and delivering comprehensive management tools to our customers.

JBoss ON provides application management for the entire JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio, including; JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Web Server and JBoss SOA Platform products.

To learn more about JBoss ON please visit the JBoss ON product website.

The Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite team is pleased to announce the general availability of RHN Satellite and Proxy version 5.2 today. Though 5.2 is an incremental release for Satellite, it marks an important update for highlights including expanded platform and database support.

Primarily a platform update, the major highlights of this release include:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform support
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is now supported as a base operating system for RHN Satellite Server and RHN Proxy installation, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Every Satellite subscription includes a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, so now you have the option of running Satellite on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. For customers who are looking to standardize their Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment on one version, they now have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as an added option.
• Oracle 10g support
  Satellite now supports Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Standard and Enterprise Edition. Oracle 10g provides better performance, especially on 64-bit platforms and is one of the most popular database versions in the world. Most Satellite subscriptions include an embedded Oracle database for Satellite to use, or you can choose to use an external copy of Oracle as well. Support for Oracle 10g gives customers more choice and flexibility in regards to how they deploy Satellite.

Since these are major platform releases, be sure to review the system requirements section of the Satellite documentation.

Other Satellite 5.2 highlights include:

• RHN Proxy Server command line installer in Technology Preview
  A Technology Preview feature is one that is currently not supported under the RHN Proxy Server subscription service, may not be functionally complete and is generally not suitable for production use. However, this feature is included as a customer convenience and to provide the feature with wider exposure. Customers may find this feature useful in a non-production environment. Customers are also free to provide feedback and functionality suggestions for this feature before it becomes fully supported in the RHN Proxy Server 5.3 release. Errata may be provided for high-severity issues.
• db-control improvements:
  • gather-stats – Gather statistics on RHN Oracle database objects
  • report-stats – Show tables with stale or empty statistics
  • shrink-segments – Shrink RHN Oracle database segments
• Bug fixes and documentation updates

For more details on the features and fixes included in this release, you may view the release notes here. Other documentation is also available.

In addition to the new release, Satellite customers are finding success with the reliable management platform. See recent Satellite customer successes.

If you have any questions, feedback, or comments, as always we invite you to participate in the RHN Satellite and Proxy community by subscribing to the rhn-satellite-users mailing list.

If you are interested in following the future direction of the products, we also encourage you to participate in the Spacewalk community.

Or, download Satellite (and all other) ISOs using your Red Hat Network account.

In line with Red Hat’s dedication to expanding the reach of open source solutions, the JBoss Operations Network (ON) team is excited to announce that JBoss ON is now available as an open source solution through the open source project Jopr. It’s pronounced like jopper. We’re also debuting a related project, Embedded Jopr, which will provide the foundation for the future administration console for JBoss Application Server. Both projects are live today.

Jopr is an enterprise management solution for JBoss Application Server as well as other JBoss and open source projects. It delivers advanced management solutions like log tracking, administration, monitoring, complex alerting, scheduled operational control, response time monitoring and configuration in an enterprise setting with fine-grained security and an advanced extension model. Its advanced metrics systems can scale to tens of thousands of monitored metrics. Including low-level cross-platform monitoring, Apache, Postgres and Oracle, this project provides one of the first high-end middleware management solutions available in open source.

Curious on where the name Jopr came from? It originated in the 80’s classic movie, WarGames. WOPR was a computer programmed to enable itself to optimally respond to any possible military situations. Well, Jopr (it’s not an acronym for the project) is designed to optimally handle customer’s JBoss middleware solutions.

Jopr is built on the RHQ project, a multi-vendor collaborative open source management platform. With plugin compatibility, extensions written within this community can be utilized within Jopr. Development of these projects is coordinated to provide a cohesive set of management solutions across a range of technologies and Red Hat, as always, is at the heart of this development. The release of Jopr completes the opening of our JBoss management technologies that began with the release of the base RHQ management platform earlier in the year.

Now, what’s Embedded Jopr? Embedded Jopr provides much of the same technologies for management in a lightweight platform that can be delivered embedded in another product. This technology is part of our vision for the future of the built-in administration console for JBoss Application Server and other JBoss middleware products. Embedded Jopr is specific to a particular platform or application server. Think 1:1 for Embedded Jopr vs. 1:many for Jopr. Jopr is enterprise management, where Embedded Jopr is for managing only one installation instance of a JBoss solution. Embedded Jopr lets you build your admin console, but you’ll also need an EAP admin console, a SOA admin console, a metamatrix admin console, etc. too.

The open-sourcing of JBoss ON comes on the heels of our announcement from the 2008 Red Hat Summit in Boston that our Red Hat management platform, Red Hat Network Satellite, would be open-sourced as Project Spacewalk. Since then, Spacewalk has had lots of wins, and we expect the same for Jopr.

Back at this year’s Red Hat Summit in June, we announced that we were open sourcing Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite under the name Project Spacewalk. In the nine weeks or so since the debut of Spacewalk, we’ve been blown away by the level of interest, the contributions and the excitement generated by the project. We’ve seen some cool results delivered quickly and we wanted to share some of Spacewalk’s milestones to date.

With the start of most open source projects, it takes a little while for the user participation and list traffic to drum up to high levels. So, we predicted that it would take months to get Spacewalk ramped up, and some time before we started receiving patches. Well, much to our surprise and excitement, Spacewalk generated early interest and results came much more quickly than we predicted.

Here are some of the impressive Spacewalk stats so far:

• Participants

• spacewalk-list@redhat.com : currently has over 250 members
  This is the main project list where those interested in the project can subscribe. We discuss current features, troubleshoot issues, announce and discuss future designs and send any project-related announcements.
• spacewalk-devel-list@redhat.com: currently has about 120 members
  Spacewalk-devel is primarily targeted toward development-related discussions, patches, feature implementation discussions, bug fixing and other development-related tasks.

• The first patch from inside Red Hat came within three days of the opening of the mailing list.
• The first patch from the community came within eight days.
• A total of nine patches have been contributed as of mid-August.

• #spacewalk: averaging approximately 80 members per day
  Building a community quickly, this Spacewalk chat allows community members to talk about installation help, design discussions, patch wrangling, development discussions and more.

From here, our community is continuing to grow and evolve. The development of Spacewalk has a public and open roadmap for our plans over the next 12 months, and the community has helped shape this roadmap already. One of the largest planned features is PostgreSQL support, which was resoundingly demanded from the community as a feature to add. Initial scoping and planning for this complex but crucial development work has already begun. Spirited discussions about how to best approach this feature has evolved on the Spacewalk mailing list with the hope that the best solution will rise to the top. Adding support for an open source database like PostgreSQL will hopefully accelerate collaboration and adoption of Spacewalk for more users and environments for years to come.

We’re really excited about the early progress that Spacewalk has seen and will keep you updated on the latest things we’re working on in upcoming blogs.

We’ll leave you with some memorable messages from the early Spacewalk chats:

• It all begins
  Jun 17 07:49:31 source code is live!
• First non-Red Hatter to install Spacewalk
  Jun 17 20:38:16 okay successfully logged in
  Jun 17 20:38:24 now comes the client side
  Jun 17 20:38:31 jeevan_ullas: rock. congrats on being the first non Red Hat person to install Spacewalk.

Click to Enlarge

For nearly seven years, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite has provided an easy-to-use systems management platform for your Linux infrastructure, making Linux deployable, scalable and manageable. RHN Satellite provides administrators with the tools to efficiently manage their systems, lowering per-system, deployment and management costs. As we continue to define and evolve our management solutions and search for new and innovative management ideas, the time has come for us to explore new horizons.

Today, at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Mass., we’ve introduced Project Spacewalk.

Spacewalk is an open source (GPLv2) Linux systems management solution. It allows you to:

• Inventory your systems (hardware and software information)
• Install and update software on your systems
• Collect and distribute your custom software packages into manageable groups
• Provision (kickstart) your systems
• Manage and deploy configuration files to your systems
• Monitor your systems
• Provision virtual guests
• Start/stop/configure virtual guests

Spacewalk is the upstream project upon which RHN Satellite will now be based. Spacewalk will work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and other Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivative distributions like CentOS and Scientific Linux. Spacewalk will bring together a growing community of new users along with seasoned systems management veterans. In this way, the Satellite product can grow (as Linux itself does) with the combined efforts of the open source leader, Red Hat, and an invigorated community. Both will work together to expand the capabilities and stature of the upstream project. This will translate into faster adoption of new, innovative ideas and technologies into the downstream Satellite product.

One of our top priorities is to to include “best of breed” open source technology where possible. Our first such integration will be providing support for Cobbler to provide provisioning in Spacewalk/Satellite. We will also be evaluating the inclusion of or integration with many more open source projects as we begin to piece together a project roadmap, for example:

• pulp
• func
• FOSS DB Alternatives

Additionally, we will be working on re-organizing Spacewalk down into smaller more consumable sub-projects to make them usable by other projects and tools.

The project is live today and you can build from source or simply install the pre-built binaries for your distribution from our hosted yum-repo. Please visit our wiki for more information on how to get the source and install the software.

Get involved and join the community. Provide us feedback on the project so far and your systems management needs. Submit a patch or two. Get involved in technical discussions on our mailing list. Help us build free and open source next-generation systems management solutions.

Last week our team announced the release of the long-awaited JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON) 2.0 at JavaOne in San Francisco. This release was several years in the making and is not only noteworthy for its new features, but also because it demonstrates our commitment to deliver tangible milestones within the JBoss Enterprise Acceleration initiative.

JBoss ON is all about increasing the reliability and visibility into applications deployed on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP). Among the new features are enhanced configuration editing and auditing, enhanced application discovery and deployment and an advanced query-based grouping system called DynaGroups. JBoss ON is now capable of scaling to much larger environments while still collecting a rich model of infrastructure performance. Rich exposure of everything from VM statistics to Hibernate details provides easy access to critical data in one place. The new grouping and security capabilities also greatly simplify the use of the security model to allow just the right levels of access to even the most complex environment. These features are designed to make it easier to know what is going on in your applications and to keep them running smoothly in mission-critical environments.

Customers are getting more sophisticated within IT Operations with respect to middleware management and are looking for specialized tools to help manage the application life cycle. JBoss ON is designed to improve efficiency for IT operations staff while reducing the TCO of managing JBoss Middleware. The consistency of application deployments and configurations from a central location throughout an enterprise results in a more secure environment, better performance & adherence to compliance requirements. As an added benefit, the monitoring solution provides health & diagnostic data to improve operational performance.

Equally as exciting is that for the first time, JBoss ON is based on an open source project called RHQ – we started talking about RHQ at JBoss World Orlando. The project aims to deliver the core management capabilities of JBoss ON in a platform model. Plugins developed for RHQ can be used with JBoss ON and will serve as a reliable platform for extending JBoss ON and further integrating JBoss projects into production systems. We’ve licensed the code, under the GPL open source license and project information and community forums are accessible at www.rhq-project.org. We’d love to have more contributors join the project so be sure to check it out.

Finally, we’ll be hosting a JBoss ON webinar on Thursday, May 15th at 4:00pm ET where you can watch a demonstration and have any questions answered in person. We’ll be focusing on the new capabilities for administration, deployment management, and monitoring of JBoss Middleware. Click here to register for the webinar. JavaOne was a really exciting event for us, check out more of our team’s blog about the event.

See the full press release: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2008/jboss_ON.html.

After hard work by our engineers to incorporate feature requests from users, we’re ready to unwrap the latest version of Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite with today’s availability of RHN Satellite 5.1. With Satellite, customers are granted comprehensive life cycle management with tools to manage systems, provision new systems, manage updates, monitor performance and more. RHN Satellite 5.1 includes some of the newest features that were born directly from issue tracker tickets submitted by customers, with added feedback from the dedicated RHN Satellite community. Thanks to all, today we’re able to provide the next version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Management platform. Here are some of the highlights in RHN Satellite 5.1:

Multiple Organization Support (Multi-Org)
While RHN Satellite 5.0 had a large focus on virtualization, 5.1 has Multi-Org. What’s Multi-Org? It allows you to create autonomous control domains within a single Satellite. With the current version of Satellite, all the entitlements, systems, etc. are owned by one organization.

With Multi-Org, one is able to create different domains within an enterprise. For example, in a bank, the Linux deployments of the investment bank business unit are completely separate from those of the car loan business unit, and the credit card business. An overall administrator assigns entitlements to the different organizations. If the investment bank tries to deploy too many systems based on their entitlements, they will not impact the car loan business unit, who planned ahead and enrolled the proper amount of entitlements.

Most of the time organizations like having their systems managed by their own teams, instead of yielding control to another group. This feature will help these organizations have more control over their systems. In this version the segregation between the groups is absolute, in the next version there will be sharing of common channels.

API Calls
With each release, we dedicate time to improve on our API facility. As good as the GUI is, there are some tasks that are just better suited for being done programmattically via the API. Our feedback from customers in the limited beta program was very positive. If you actively use this, and after reviewing our recent additions you don’t find your favorite non-implemented API call, please bring it to our attention via an issue tracker. The main focus on this release surrounds configuration management and activation keys.

Web Interface Enhancements
We’ve strived to improve the web interface interface as well. Our team is always listening to customers, and looking for ways to improve it. You’ll note improvements in key areas such as: CSV file export on select screens, a new search feature and improvements in sorting and filtering data with the web interface. As with the API calls, time is allocated in each release to address UI concerns, so give us your feedback.

64-bit Satellite
Customers have asked for a 64-bit version of Satellite. We listened! We understand that among other reasons, most customers are standardizing their hardware purchases, to 64-bit platforms. The 64-bit version is feature identical to 32-bit.

Satellite on zSeries (S390)
You knew Red Hat Enterprise Linux was supported on Mainframes, right? Well, now RHN Satellite is supported too. There are numerous advantages to this, aside from utilizing hardware you already own. Satellite on zSeries is very scalable in that if Satellite is running out of resources in its partition, you can speed it up by allocating more CPUs. For instances running on the zSeries network, traffic travels at near memory speed.

So, there you have the key features available today in RHN Satellite 5.1. Rounding out the release are Solaris enhancements and a new exporter tool to assist in exporting data to other satellites.

The beautiful thing about Red Hat’s subscription model is that customers currently subscribed to Red Hat Network Satellite will automatically receive the latest RHN Satellite 5.1 updates in their subscription. For those without an RHN subscription, look into it here.