Host Provisioning - Hardware Models - SPARC

[CliffordW]

Hi friends!

Just as I started thinking I understand enough about Satellite for my exam, I found this statement in the course material:

"Hardware models can help you to run unattended installations on hosts that are based on the Scalable Processor Architecture (SPARC)."

My understanding is that RHEL doesn't support SPARC, and this is backed by https://access.redhat.com/solutions/29249. What am I missing?

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,

Clifford

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

@CliffordW could you please point me in the course where you see this ?

@Travis FYI

[CliffordW]

Hi there,

It is in the "Red Hat Satellite 6 Administration (RH403) v6.11" course, in "Chapter 8. Prepare Network Resources for Host Provisioning".

Kind regards,

Clifford

[Travis]

@Chetan_Tiwary_ -

I think I have found where @CliffordW saw it in the book and it is a little misleading and confusing to say the least. The current versions of RHEL are not supported on SPARC hardware and the way the book has the information, it could be misleading like RHEL is supported on SPARC and other hardware. There are very clear places defining the hardware that Satellite is supported on (as well as operating systems and versions) as well as what types of hardware RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) is supported on. I believe what is in the book has been carried over from previous versions of the course and our documentation as shown with the link below.

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_satellite/6.0/html-single/user_guide/index#sect-Red...

What should be understood however, is that while RHEL isn't supported on SPARC, Red Hat Satellite (at one time) could support various operating systems and hardware configurations and models. In fact, at one time it is/was possible to use Satellite as a YUM repository and hosting of CentOS and other repositories for installation. I don't know that we sell it any longer, but I remember you could get smart management so you could register non-RHEL systems to satellite for patching and management.

Keep in mind, Satellite 6 is a combination of upstream projects (Foreman/Katello) being some of the largest for patch management and system management, but we also have Puppet, Ansible, Pulp, Candlepin, etc ... which make up the various Satellite components. Newer versions of Satellite 6 also include a container registry which can host container images. 

I do think for consistency and clarity, we should rework the content that is in the book and possibly give more up-to-date and more relevant examples such as ARM and x86_64 maybe or even have cloud items in there and remove SPARC as it would just cause a bunch of confusion.

Tagging @bonnevil for comment.

[CliffordW]

Hi Travis,

Thanks. Yes, that explanation makes sense. That content is confusing though, so I second your suggestion that it be cleaned up a little

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,

Clifford

[bonnevil]

Yeah, this feels like content that's been blindly carried forward. 

The earliest reference to SPARC in this section of the course seems to be for Satellite 6.6, although the latest documentation reference mentioning the architecture that I've found is in the Satellite 6.2 Host guide, and all it says is "Hardware models help run unattended installations on systems based on the Scalable Processor Architecture (SPARC)." There's also a comment in step four "For SPARC builds, insert the CPU Hardware model and Vendor class. Other architectures do not require values in these fields."

Those sentences are gone in later updates of that document; the Satellite 6.6 docs merely say as the analogous step three "Optionally, in the Hardware Model and Vendor Class fields, you can enter corresponding information for your system."

At the time the comment was added to the course, as best as I can tell, the author also still said "Sun SPARC" -- that was already ancient history, it should have been Oracle SPARC or just SPARC at that time (and it's likely that the processor architecture team at Oracle had already been laid off when it was added).

Tracking through the current version of the Knowledgebase article on provisioning support in Satellite, https://access.redhat.com/solutions/2674001, we have this critical statement:

Satellite 6 is based on open-source project Foreman which is known to provision and manage many operating systems including CentOS, Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE, Solaris or FreeBSD. This is however undocumented and not supported by Red Hat support channels. [emphasis mine]

Given all of that, this reads like this part of the content might be getting spun in an obsolete or unsupported way. It's been a while since I've been directly involved with the main Satellite course, so we'll need to talk to the developer team about how best to address this issue.

PS  I know for a fact that the last time Red Hat Linux was built for the SPARC architecture was for Red Hat Linux 6.2; we dropped support in something like 2000.  So anything involving SPARC after that would be on some other operating system like Solaris, and never was for RHEL.

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

@bonnevil I have raised a JIRA to track this one : https://issues.redhat.com/browse/PTL-14017