Master the full lifecycle of Red Hat Satellite 6 administration, built on the open source Foreman and Katello platform. This course takes students from initial server installation and architecture planning through repository synchronization, content view management, host registration, Puppet configuration management, and automated provisioning, building the skills needed to manage enterprise RHEL infrastructure at scale with centralized control.
The curriculum covers Satellite architecture and deployment planning, organization and location setup, subscription manifest management, and content workflows including sync plans, content views with filters, composite content views, and lifecycle environment promotion paths. Host management topics include registering existing systems with subscription-manager and activation keys, managing packages and errata through Katello, and executing remote jobs across host collections using SSH-based Remote Execution with ERB job templates. Configuration management is covered through deep Puppet integration: module development with PDK, environment management, class assignment, Smart Class Parameters, and Puppet Forge.
Advanced topics include FreeIPA integration for centralized identity management and automatic realm joining during provisioning, bare-metal provisioning with PXE boot and Discovery, and virtual machine provisioning through compute resources such as libvirt, VMware, and cloud platforms. With 29 lab exercises across eight chapters, including a dedicated virtualization integration lab chapter, students build and manage a complete Satellite infrastructure from the ground up.