Experts, would like to hear on the support for Alma Linux and Rocky linux as clients? I dont see the official page shows these Operating systems are supported. Will it still shows it as unknown when integrated to katello-foreman?
We are currently evaluating Alma Linux and Rocky, any inputs on the support would really help us take decision as our major automations are done via foreman-katello-puppet.
Hi,
referring to the “official sources” here since I have not tested Alma or Rocky in Foreman myself.
According to client operating system requirements, any OS that can run the clients required to integrate with Foreman/Katello is generally supported. That applies to Alma and Rocky, since they run anything RHEL can.
The official templates that ship with Foreman (e.g. kickstart_default.erb) even mention Alma and Rocky explicitly.
As mentioned in the Client requirements docs, only CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu are directly tested, but in theory that means everything should work on Alma and Rocky. Maybe someone with direct experience using one or the other with Foreman can give more insight on how good it’s actually working in practice, but at least in theory it should and I would consider everything that does not a bug.
Regards
Hi to both of you!
So, I have been using Rocky Linux 8 for quite a long time to host Foreman / Katello installations up to now.
Never tried deploying machines, but as far as I could see everything else works the same way as it did with CentOS 8, and since the deprecation of this OS also these changes (ansible from EPEL/configmgmt-sig → ansible-core from AppStream) work the same way as in RHEL 8.
I basically didn’t see any difference, which is also the goal of the RHEL clones, in the sense of function and performance.
And as far as I can see the new docs also mention Enterprise Linux 8 more and more often instead of CentOS 8.
So yeah it’s still not explicitly mentioned that these distros are supported, but in my experience they work very much the same (in my case only tested with Rocky Linux).
Tbh, it also makes sense to not directly mention them if they are not tested, it still would be great to see a list of known working but not supported list.
Thank you so much for the responses.
It gives more confidence when someone tried and says it supports. I was kind of trying to create a docker image to host the foreman/katello with puppet and not successful so far. Its good to hear we have a path forward with Rocky Linux to host foreman/katello.
Thank you for the reply.
Greetings,
I stood up Foreman 3.2.1 on Rocky Linux 8.6 about six weeks ago, and it is running very smoothly. Also, I have deployed about two dozen Rocky Linux dev and production hosts (v8.5 and 8.6) with Foreman and the results are also very satisfactory. The default “Kickstart default” and “Kickstart default PXELinux” templates work very well unmodified.
Additionally, I have successfully deployed AlmaLinux 8.5 and 8.6 in the same manner, just for testing (we are focusing on Rocky in our environment.)
One caveat though: Rocky 8.6 anaconda now requires more than 2 GB of RAM for provisioning. Give it 3 or 4 to start. This is not a Foreman issue, but I am mentioning it as related.
Hope this helps.
I‘m running ~15 AlmaLinux 8 clients for a while now without problems.
And I am even running my next production Foreman/Katello servers and proxies on Alma8 and have so far seen no issues related to the choice of base os.