Foreman 3.10 and SCA Manifests

Support
1

Hello community,

we are using a foreman instance and are now unsure about the latest update with the “new” SCA enabled manifests. We cannot find the right part of the foreman/RHEL documentation that answers our question.

Problem:
When reading the documentation, it seems that after the foreman upgrade, we have to upload a new manifest which has the Simple content access enabled. But we are not able to create manifests in the new RedHat Cloud Console. We only can create manifests in the legacy portal, but those are not SCA enabled.
Somewhere on the internet we read, that a Satellite License is needed to create manifests?

Question:
Is there a possibility to still use a foreman instance without having a satellite licence to provide RHEL repositories to our machines?

Best Regards,

2

No need to upload a new manifest after upgrade. The SCA migration is handled for you.

Side note: For several releases now, SCA status is set on the Foreman organization, not the manifest. The SCA toggle on the manifest will be ignored.

If you want to create a new manifest, the two options are:

  1. Create a blank manifest on console.redhat.com, import it into Foreman, and add subscriptions in the Foreman UI.
  2. (deprecated) Create a manifest and add subscriptions to it on the Customer Portal, then import it into Foreman.

But again, neither of these is necessary when upgrading Foreman to 3.10.

You have always needed a RHEL subscription in your manifest to provide RHEL repositories to your hosts, and this is not changing.

3

Thanks for the clarification.
So when I understand correctly, our current manifest will still work after the upgrade.
But what happens when we have to add licences to our manifest and we are not able anymore to edit our manifest via the Customer Portal?
In the console.redhat.com, we are not able to create or edit manifests, we always get an error 403 - Forbidden.

4

As a side note it is not a license, but a subscription. And subscriptions are no longer maintained in this way with SCA. So the manifest will give you access to all content you have a subscription for. You can then mirror, stage, install as you need it. To ensure you do not use more then subscriptions allow, you can count your own and if an audit happens you will have to get the auditor the data or the preferred way there is a plugin which does the upload of the count to Red Hat which also handles data from virt-who. The plugin is called RH-Cloud: GitHub - theforeman/foreman_rh_cloud: a plugin to Foreman that generates and uploads reports to the Red Hat cloud

5

This is a permissions problem with your Red Hat account. Hopefully you can contact your organization admin and they will be able to give you the appropriate permissions.

Until then, you can use the Foreman UI. Ensure you have a manifest imported. Then navigate to Content > Subscriptions, and add subscriptions there. This will cause a manifest refresh and the subscriptions will be added to your manifest.

This is not quite true (yet). You still must have, in your manifest, at least quantity 1 of each subscription. You can then use that subscription in Foreman without regard to quantities. In the future, you won’t even need to add 1 of each subscription – but we’re not there quite yet.

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6

Thanks, we will have a look into this plugin. This seems very useful

I have verified the permissions and unfortunately it seems that I have all the needed permissions.
My account is an “Org Admin” account and the permissions for subscriptions is the following:

Application Resource type Operation
subscriptions * *

But this is probably not foreman related and I should probably check this problem with our local Redhat contact