New to Foreman/Katello and have some questions regarding content views.
Once I create a content view and promote it to an environment:
Does this mean that the updates in the content view automatically get applied to all the servers in that environment? Or does it mean that the updates are available to those servers and I need to run “yum update” to apply them?
If they automatically get applied, when do they get applied? Immediately?
If not, does Foreman provide any scheduling capabilities where I can schedule the updates to automatically be applied unattended?
A content view is a snapshot of the repositories in the content view. Only the content in this repositories at that snapshot is available to clients. You still have to install updates.
You can schedule a job which installs all updates available.
One more question. Say for example the content view has updates for 10 different packages available, out of which only 5 packages are installed on a server. So, updates for only those 5 packages will get applied to that server, correct? In other words, no new packages will be installed, just existing packages will be updated?
Again: a content view is just a snapshot of some repositories. Installation of new packages or updates of existing packages works just like it always does. To the client it’s still just repositories which contain some packages and the client derived from the repository if there are updates available and you can also install new packages from the repositories in the content view. The content view itself doesn’t install or update anything on your client.
The only difference is that it’s a snapshot, i.e. it won’t change until you publish a new version of the content view and promote it to the client’s environment. For example, if your content view contains the centos7 updates repositories from centos.org the snapshot contains only the packages which were synced to foreman at that time.
I don’t know how familiar you are with the resources available, but we have a content management guide over on Content Management Guide that might be of use as you’re learning.
Thanks for the link. Yes, I have reviewed the guide, as well as the Katello and RH Satellite documentation. They are quite useful. Just needed some doubts clarified.
