Katello

What do you like best?

Initially we were considering Red Hat Satellite for applying patches to all our Linux Physical as well as Virtual Servers. Our client didn't wanted to pay for the licensing cost and then we decided to go with Katello/Foreman.

It's an open source complete life cycle systems management tool for provisioning, configuring and monitoring of physical and virtual servers. We didn't had any technical background knowledge of using Katello. The setup was easy and pushing patches to servers is also very convenient.

Katello is essentially Foreman Plug-in for Subscription and Repository Management. and also facilitates provisioning and life cycle management through Foreman.

What do you dislike?

Katello is very easy to manage and we didn't really had any major issues with it. It communicates through goferd process to each managed servers. We have faced some weird errors managing goferd and it required bouncing it before we begin patching.

We also had to version lock some of the packages directly on the target server. It would have been cool if we could version lock packages from katello itself and push that version lock to desired servers.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We have 6 ESXi Physical Hosts, 4 HP Linux Physical Servers and around 200 virtual machines. Applying quarterly patches to all these servers without Katello is unimaginable for us. The overall patching requires just a couple hours including bouncing of all the servers post patching.