Looking at RHN Subscription Management

The ultimate goal of entitlement management is to allow administrators to identify the relationship between their systems and the subscriptions used by those systems. This can be done from two different perspectives: from the perspective of the local system looking externally to potential subscriptions and from the perspective of the organization, looking down at the total infrastructure of systems and all subscriptions.

The CentOS Subscription Manager GUI and CLI are both local clients which manage only the local machine. These tools are somewhat limited in their view; they only disclose information (such as available entitlements) from the perspective of that one system, so expired and depleted subscriptions or subscriptions for other architectures aren't displayed.

RHN Subscription Management in the Customer Portal is a global tool which is intended to give complete, organization-wide views into subscriptions and systems. It shows all subscriptions and all consumers for the entire organization. RHN Subscription Management can perform many of the tasks of the local tools, like registering consumers, assigning subscriptions, and viewing system facts and UUID. It can also manage the subscriptions themselves, such as viewing contract information and renewing subscriptions - a task not possible in the local clients.

RHN Subscription Management in the Customer Portal

Figure 14.6. RHN Subscription Management in the Customer Portal


RHN Subscription Management gives a global view of all consumers, of all types, for an organization, which is crucial for planning and effectively assigning subscriptions. However, it does not provide any insight into what products are installed on a system and whether subscriptions are assigned for those products. To track the validity of installed products, you must use the local Subscription Manager tools.

RHN Subscription Management also provides a view of systems and subscriptions managed under RHN Classic and provides access to the RHN Classic web tools.

All of the subscriptions for an entire organization - the subscriptions that have been purchased and the systems to which they have been allocated - are viewable through the account pages at . Additional information about RHN Subscription Management is available with the portal documentation at .