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Chapter 5. Provisioning with Satellite

5.1. Requirements
5.2. Definitions and Terms
5.3. Provisioning Scenarios Supported
5.4. Overview of Preparing a Satellite for Provisioning
5.5. Kickstart Trees And Software Content
5.5.1. Automatically Installed Kickstart Trees
5.5.2. Manually Installed Kickstart Trees
5.5.3. Required Distribution Files
5.5.4. Required Packages
5.6. Kickstart Profiles
5.6.1. Virtualization Types
5.6.2. Creating Kickstart Profiles
5.7. Templating
5.7.1. Use Cases
5.7.2. Variables
5.7.3. Snippets
5.8. Kickstarting a Machine
5.8.1. Bare Metal
5.8.2. Re-Provisioning
5.8.3. Virtualized Guest Provisioning
5.8.4. Provisioning Through an RHN Proxy
5.9. Advanced Topics
5.9.1. API
5.9.2. Cobbler On the Command Line
5.9.3. Cobbler Command Line: Next Steps
5.9.4. Naming Conventions
5.9.5. Other Cobbler settings
5.9.6. Using Koan directly
5.10. Troubleshooting
5.10.1. Web Interface errors
5.10.2. Anaconda Startup errors
5.10.3. Anaconda content errors
5.10.4. Cobbler log files
5.10.5. Tracebacks from Taskomatic
5.10.6. Registration Issues
5.10.7. Directory structure for Kickstarts and Snippets
All organizations need simple, yet powerful tools to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. For many years, Red Hat Network Satellite has empowered companies to build repeatable, predictable and reliable deployment processes to ensure rapid repurposing of Linux servers and desktops. Whether you have 10 systems or 10,000 systems, RHN Satellite can help you achieve this goal in a disciplined fashion. Now, after significant investment, RHN Satellite 5.3 has dramatically boosted the flexibility and power of its signature provisioning capabilities.
This document contains concise details and instructions for use of the kickstart provisioning functionality in Red Hat Network Satellite.

5.1. Requirements

To use the new provisioning functionality, you need one or more target machines — either physical, bare metal computer system(s) or virtual machine host(s). If you want to use Satellite's virtual machine provisioning functionality, your virtual machine host(s) should be configured with either the Xen or KVM virtualization technologies. Note that RHEL 5.4 and newer support KVM virtualization at this time.