Katello nightly Installation

Important Note for Existing Installations

Katello does not currently support installation on existing Foreman deployments. DO NOT attempt to install Katello on an existing Foreman deployment, unless you are a Foreman developer and willing to debug the broken configuration that will result from attempting an install on existing system.

Hardware Requirements

Katello may be installed onto a baremetal host or on a virtual guest. The minimum requirements are:

• Two Logical CPUs
• 12 GB of memory (16 GB or greater may be required depending on the amount of managed content)
• The filesystem holding /var/lib/pulp needs to be large, but may vary depending on how many different Operating Systems you wish to syncronize:
  • Allocate 30 GB of space for each operating system. Even though an operating system may not take up this much space now, this allows space for future updates that will be syncronized later.
• The path /var/spool/squid/ is used as a temporary location for some types of repository syncs and may grow to consume 10s of GB of space before the files are migrated to /var/lib/pulp. You may wish to put this on the same partition as /var/lib/pulp.
• The filesystem holding /var/lib/mongodb needs at least 4 GB to install, but will vary depending on how many different Operating Systems you wish to syncronize:
  • Allocate around 40% of the capacity that has been given to the /var/lib/pulp filesystem
• The root filesystem needs at least 20 GB of Disk Space

Required Ports

The following ports need to be open to external connections:

• 80 TCP - HTTP, used for provisioning purposes
• 443 TCP - HTTPS, used for web access and api communication
• 5646 TCP - qdrouterd - used for Qpid Dispatch Router on a Smart Proxy to communicate with Qpid Dispatch Router on Foreman server
• 5647 TCP - qdrouterd - used for client and Smart Proxy actions
• 9090 TCP - HTTPS - used for communication with the Smart Proxy

Production

Katello provides a Puppet based installer for deploying production installations. Production installations are supported on the following operating systems:

• CentOS 7 (x86_64)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (x86_64)

Installation may be done manually or via our recommended approach of using forklift.

Required Repositories

Select your Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Enterprise Linux 7 (CentOS, etc.)

subscription-manager repos --disable "*"
subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-rpms
subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-optional-rpms
subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-extras-rpms
subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-server-rhscl-7-rpms
yum install -y yum-utils

yum -y localinstall https://yum.theforeman.org/releases/nightly/el7/x86_64/foreman-release.rpm
yum -y localinstall https://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/nightly/katello/el7/x86_64/katello-repos-latest.rpm
yum -y localinstall https://yum.puppet.com/puppet6-release-el-7.noarch.rpm
yum -y install epel-release centos-release-scl-rh

Installation

After setting up the appropriate repositories, update your system:

yum -y update

Then install Katello:

yum -y install katello

At this point the foreman-installer should be available to setup the server. The installation may be customized, to see a list of options:

foreman-installer --scenario katello --help

These may be set as command line options or in the answer file (/etc/foreman-installer/scenarios.d/katello-answers.yaml). Now run the options:

foreman-installer --scenario katello <options>

Multiple subnets and domains

The installer only supports one subnet and one DNS domain via command line arguments. Multiple entries can be entered via /etc/foreman-installer/custom-hiera.yaml file:

dhcp::pools:
 isolated.lan:
   network: 192.168.99.0
   mask: 255.255.255.0
   gateway: 192.168.99.1
   range: 192.168.99.5 192.168.99.49
dns::zones:
  # creates @ SOA $::fqdn root.example.com.
  # creates $::fqdn A $::ipaddress
  example.com: {}

  # creates @ SOA test.example.net. hostmaster.example.com.
  # creates test.example.net A 192.0.2.100
  example.net:
    soa: test.example.net
    soaip: 192.0.2.100
    contact: hostmaster.example.com.

  # creates @ SOA $::fqdn root.example.org.
  # does NOT create an A record
  example.org:
    reverse: true

  # creates @ SOA $::fqdn hostmaster.example.com.
  2.0.192.in-addr.arpa:
    reverse: true
    contact: hostmaster.example.com.

Tuning options

The Foreman installer supports automatic tuning of your environment using predefined tuning profiles. These tuning profiles are the result of a culmination of extensive learning from Foreman environments deployed at scale in large user environments.

When the foreman-installer is run, it is deployed with a default predefined tuning profile. Other than the default tuned profile, foreman-installer supports 4 different tuning profiles:

• medium
• large
• extra-large
• extra-extra-large

Based on your environment needs, use one of the tuning profiles (medium, large, extra-large, extra-extra-large) in the installer. For example, medium profile can be applied like:

foreman-installer --tuning medium

To reset to the default profile:

foreman-installer --tuning default

Use foreman-installer --help | grep tuning to identify the current tuning level.

Sample output for medium tuning:

foreman-installer --help | grep tuning
    --tuning INSTALLATION_SIZE    Tune for an installation size. Choices: default, medium, large, extra-large, extra-extra-large (default: "medium")

Sample output for default tuning:

foreman-installer --help | grep tuning
    --tuning INSTALLATION_SIZE    Tune for an installation size. Choices: default, medium, large, extra-large, extra-extra-large (default: "default")

Note

• Definitions of various tuning profiles can be found in this directory /usr/share/foreman-installer/config/foreman.hiera/tuning/sizes/. Note that common.yaml is always applied and the selected tuning profile (e.g., medium) is applied on top and takes precedence.
• Using the --tuning option does not update /etc/foreman-installer/custom-hiera.yml, instead it directly updates the required configuration as specified in the corresponding tuning profile. You can still use custom-hiera.yml to override any configuration if really needed.
• If you had already used custom-hiera.yml and starting to use the tuned profiles, you may want to review the definition of tuned profiles (/usr/share/foreman-installer/config/foreman.hiera/tuning/common.yaml and /usr/share/foreman-installer/config/foreman.hiera/tuning/sizes/) and remove the duplicated configuration entries from your custom-hiera.yml.
• You can also optionally use foreman-installer --tuning <profile> --noop to run the installer in a test mode and identify what configurations will be changed before actually running the installer.

Which tuning profile should you choose?

It is difficult to find the exact tuning profile for a specific environment in the first attempt because it depends on various factors like the number of managed hosts, the features used in scale (E.g., Remote Execution), the bulk actions on hosts, the total amount of content, amount of host traffic to foreman, etc. Our recommendation is that you start with the tuning profile guidance as shown in the below table based on the number of managed hosts and scale up your environment as needed.

Note

• The information in the table below is just a guidance. It is strongly recommended that you monitor the foreman environment regularly and tune up as required.
• The RAM and CPU Cores check is also integrated into the foreman-installer now. Use disable-system-checks if you like to skip this check in the installer.

Forklift

Foreman provides a git repository designed to streamline setup by setting up all the proper repositories. Forklift provides the ability to deploy a virtual machine instance via Vagrant or direct deployment on an already provisioned machine. For details on how to install using forklift, please see the README.