I have been continuing my proof-of-concept of using Foreman and Katello in my enterprise. So far, so good.
I’m curious to start deploying Katello SmartProxies and test provisioning off of the synced media on said SmartProxies. However my target infrastructure to install them on is CentOS8.
It is my understanding that CentOS8 is not supported yet to install a Katello SmartProxy on, correct?
I’m mostly just wondering if this is true and if it is, is there any rough idea of when it will be supported?
There is no explicit roadmap, but the desire is there. There are just a lot of problems that need to be solved around Pulp 3 integration. Only recently Katello can operate without Pulp 2 at all (which will never ship on EL8). Current integration work is focused on just getting Katello itself to run on EL8. Once that works, we’ll look at the Smart Proxy side of it.
My only real desire to be able to have a Katello SmartProxy is that I will have a few “branch offices” which have a very slow WAN connection. Thus, provisioning a system off of a WAN connection can take quite a bit. Having the CentOS8 content synced to a SmartProxy onsite would help immensely with build times.
So, if I’m understanding correctly, is the challenge that Katello traditionally uses Pulp 2, however EL8 only supports Pulp 3, which I imagine is incompatible with Pulp 2 (for example, it cannot synchronize a repository available from Pulp 3), or is the problem deeper that that?
I ask because, I wonder if I absolutely had to, if it would be possible to install Pulp 3 on my EL8 “branch servers” to synchronize with the CentOS8 repository on my Katello server (on CentOS7) and then somehow build hosts off of that?
Or maybe I could maintain a separate Pulp 3 server from Katello which would synchronize with my branch servers?
If this was technically possible, it would allow me to work around my bandwidth issue, although it wouldn’t be the most efficient model ever.
I apologize for the stupid questions. Although I am learning a lot, which is great, I am stepping into new territory, so I may be speaking out of my butt a bit here!
Disclaimer: We just upgraded our Foreman Katello setup to > 2.0/3.15 today, and thus has only now gotten the possibility of provisioning CentOS 8 through this. So I have not done any of this myself, yet.
My understanding is that you just needed Katello 3.15+ in order to have support for CentOS 8 repositories. As far as I remember reading, it was something to do with the AppStreams during provisioning, that didn’t quite work. Anyways, you don’t need to run Katello on a CentOS 8 host, in order to sync CentOS 8 repositories.
In a nut shell, you need to use CentOS 7 hosts for your Foreman Katello setup, and then provision CentOS 8 nodes from this.
Then at a later state, when Katello supports it, you would need to upgrade those CentOS 7 hosts to 8.
@reenberg is correct that to provision CentOS 8 machines, the Smart Proxy itself doesn’t have to run on CentOS 8. That already works with Katello 3.15+ which itself can run on EL7.
