RH403: Subscription consumption via content views and activation keys

[harjitsachar]

Hi,

In content views we add repos that the hosts that subscribe to that content view will get. So this should decide what subscriptions the host will consume. Yet, we explicitly allocate subscriptions in activation keys. Any idea why this is so?

Since we are manually assigning subscriptions to an activation key , can it be possible that we can marry a content view with incompatible repos to an activation key.

[Fran_Garcia]

You allocate subscriptions because you might have different subscriptions that provide the same content.

Imagine this scenario:

- You have a pool of regular RHEL subscriptions.

- You have another pool of Satellite and Capsule subscriptions (this subscription also provides access to RHEL repositories).

- You have yet another pool of Openshift subscriptions (which also covers RHEL).

Now if you try to register a regular RHEL system with an Activation key, the system wouldn't know which one of those products to attach. Since they all provide RHEL, any one could be fine but you don't want to assign the Capsule or Openshift subscriptions to systems that aren't going to be running those products (because they'll end up being unavailable for the systems that do need them).

That's why you need to attach subscriptions in your activation keys. Also remember that you can use multiple activation keys in the same registraton process, as to keep things simple. You can have an AK that provides "RHEL", another one that provides "Internal tools / repos", etc. (Altough only the last one sets the content view, environment, etc).