Red Hat Satellite and Ansible Tower

What is Red Hat Satellite?

Red Hat Satellite is a comprehensive system management solution that empowers you to effortlessly deploy, configure, and maintain your systems across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. With Satellite, you can easily provision, remotely manage, and monitor multiple Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments using a centralised tool.

Satellite seamlessly synchronises content from Red Hat Customer Portal and other sources, offering fine-grained life cycle management, user and group role-based access control, integrated subscription management, and advanced GUI, CLI, or API access.

What is Red Hat Capsule?

Red Hat Satellite Capsule Server facilitates content federation across multiple geographical locations. Acting as a mirror for the content from Red Hat Satellite Server, it allows host systems to retrieve content and configuration from the Capsule Server in their respective locations instead of relying on the central Satellite Server.

In addition to content mirroring, the Capsule Server offers localized services such as Puppet Master, DHCP, DNS, and TFTP. As the number of managed systems in your environment grows, Capsule Servers play a vital role in effectively scaling Red Hat Satellite.

By optimising content distribution and providing essential services at local levels, the Capsule Server empowers seamless management and enhances the scalability of Red Hat Satellite.

What is Ansible Tower?

Ansible Tower is an enterprise-grade IT automation platform that empowers users to centralize and manage their infrastructure effortlessly. With its intuitive visual dashboard, role-based access control, and job scheduling capabilities, it provides organizations with a comprehensive solution for efficient operations. As the enterprise version of Ansible, it enables seamless scaling and collaboration within teams. While there is an associated cost for adopting and installing Ansible Tower, its enhanced control and ability to break down silos make it a valuable platform for cross-functional efficiency.

Why Ansible Tower for Automation?

Ansible Tower extends beyond the command-line interface of Ansible, presenting a web user interface that feels more intuitive to the majority of our customers, employers, and non-technical individuals. With Tower, system administrators and DevOps/automation specialists can effectively showcase the value and capabilities of automation. It facilitates smoother training and demos, leading to quicker acceptance and overall buy-in. Incorporating this tool into your long-term automation strategy becomes seamless.

The Integration of Red Hat Satellite and Ansible Tower Project

Integrating Red Hat Satellite with Ansible Tower can provide even greater benefits for managing your IT infrastructure. By utilising both tools together, you can automate routine tasks like patching or provisioning while also having the ability to manage and track inventory, configurations, and compliance. This integration allows for a more streamlined and efficient process, reducing the risk of errors and improving productivity.

By integrating it with Ansible Tower, you can take full advantage of the automation capabilities to improve your IT operations.

One of the key benefits of this integration is the ability to automate patching across your entire infrastructure. Red Hat Satellite’s patching feature enables administrators to schedule and deploy patches to multiple servers at once, saving time and effort. With Ansible Tower, you can further streamline this process by automating the entire patching workflow from start to finish.

Case Study

What was the Red Hat Satellite and Tower Ansible Challenge?

A large insurance company decided to invest in modernising their Open Source Linux platform with the ability to automate its server builds and patching functionality. They had difficulty in provisioning new servers and maintaining the required patching levels without significant investment in manual configurations and builds. This was taking too long so they needed to find a technical automated solution to deliver consistent builds that were fully secure.

To meet this challenge ONQU was engaged to deliver a fully resourced and project managed technical teams with the required skills to complete the installation and configuration.

What did ONQU do?

ONQU provided a multi-skilled team including experienced system administrators, network engineers and DevOps experts to make sure the project was delivered on time and with minimal disruption. Our team worked closely with the customer at every stage of the process, from the initial design of the architecture through to installation, configuration and ongoing maintenance.

ONQU completed the installation and configuration of a Red Hat Satellite environment to automate their rollout of patch updates and configuration of their Linux servers and open-source application platform. Once the initial phase was completed in test and tested it was then connected to Ansible tower to allow automated scripts for deployment and standardisation of the the build and rollout process.

ONQU Satellite and Ansible Tower Skills

By utilising our wide range of skill sets, ONQU ensured that all areas were covered in order to achieve a successful outcome. We also provided training for their in-house IT team so they could confidently manage and maintain the new system going forward.

Now that the project is complete, the customer now has access to an automated patching system which can be easily managed by its own IT staff while still providing security updates keeping systems secure and up-to-date.

What delivery approach was taken?

The project was delivered using an Agile project delivery methodology with a Scalable Proof of Concept (SPOC) which allowed the non production servers to be upgraded and then tested first.

The delivery approach allows for lessons to be learned during the SPOC process with issues contained and resolved quickly at a low scale. Once the upgrade had been completed the proven approach is scaled to the production rather than starting the process again. This saves significant time and resources helping to deliver the projct on time and within budget.

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Why Wait, Take advantage of the ONQU Services today.

So why wait? Contact us today to get started on your Technology journey with ONQU. We are committed to providing the best-in-class services you deserve. Trust ONQU – your dedicated partner in achieving Enterprise technology success.