Provisioning — The process of configuring a machine (physical or virtual) to a predefined known state. Satellite ultimately accomplishes provisioning in all cases through the mechanism of kickstarting.

Kickstarting — A process of installing a Red Hat based system in an automated manner requiring little or no user intervention. Technically, kickstart refers to a mechanism in the Anaconda installation program that allows you supply a concise description of the contents and configuration of a machine to the installer, which it then acts on. Such a concise system definition is referred to in Satellite 5.3.0 as a Kickstart Profile.

Kickstart Profile – The kickstart file is a text file that specifies all of the options needed to kickstart a machine, including partitioning information, network configuration, and packages to install. In RHN Satellite, a Kickstart Profile is a superset of a traditional Anaconda kickstart definition, as Satellite's implementation builds on Cobbler's enhancements to kickstarting. A Kickstart Profile presumes the existence of a Kickstart Tree.

Kickstart Tree – The software and support files needed in order to kickstart a machine. This is also often called an "install tree". This is usually the directory structure and files pulled from the installation media that ships with a particular release. In Cobbler terminology, a Kickstart Tree is part of a Distro - short for distribution.

PXE or Preboot eXecution Environment — A low-level protocol that makes it possible to kickstart bare-metal machines (usually physical, or real, machines) on power-up with no pre-configuration of the target machine itself. PXE relies on a DHCP server to inform clients about bootstrap servers (for purposes of this document, Satellite 5.3.0 installations). PXE must be supported in the firmware of the target machine in order to be used. It is possible to use the virtualization and reinstall facilities of Satellite without PXE, though PXE is very useful for booting new physical machines, or reinstalling machines that are not registered to Satellite.