A Foreman proxy (that is the upstream software of the Red Hat Network Satellite Server 6 Capsules) is a server that mirrors the contents from Katello. It's primary aim is to facilitate content federation across various geographical locations, but it is often used to:

  • decrease the load on the central Katello server
  • reduce bandwidth usage onto geographical links
  • increase redundancy, and also to achieve a fine grained segregation level that may be required by some regulatory

Unless you are working in a quite small and not geographically distributed environment, it is very likely that you must provision a Foreman proxy sooner or later.

Provisioning Foreman proxies, same way as installing software in general, is a typical time consuming and error prone task that is often convenient to automate in some way.

As we already saw in the previous post, we can install Foreman proxy using Ansible having it to:

  • ensure that the target systems meet the minimal requirements
  • automatically partition the systems in the most convenient way
  • install everything taking in account of using the right versions of the involved packages so as to avoid installation failure because of wrong dependencies
  • set up all the configurations that are required to improve the usability of the installed environment
  • take care of issuing all the necessary statements to configure a Foreman proxy (a Capsule) on Katello (the Satellite) and automatically provision it

This is the second part of the "Install Katello Using Ansible" post: we are about to see how the playbooks developed in that post can be used to easily install Foreman-proxy using Ansible.

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