Managing CentOS 8 Systems Guide

CentOS 8 is a community driven Linux distribution that is binary compatible to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This guide shows how to deploy a host running CentOS 8 when starting with a basic orcharhino installation.

This guide presumes a basic understanding of orcharhino’s content management capabilities as outlined in the content management guide.

Deploying hosts running CentOS 8 requires an already attached compute resource. Refer to the compute resources chapter on how to add a compute resource provider to orcharhino.

  1. Create a product called CentOS 8

    Creating a product

    • Only the Name (1) and Label (2) fields are required. A product is just a named collection of repositories and we have yet to add any repositories. Any spaces in the name will be replaced with underscores for the label, which is used internally and cannot be changed once the product has been created.

    • (Optional) Select the CentOS 8 GPG Key from the GPG Key drop down menu (3). Refer to the content credentials page on how to import the CentOS 8 GPG key.

    • You can optionally add an SSL CA Cert, SSL Client Cert, and SSL Client Key in their respective drop down menus (4). Upload SSL certificates on the content credentials page.

    • Products can be associated with an existing sync plan via the Sync Plan drop down menu (5).

    • You may add an arbitrary Description (6).

    • The Save button (7) creates the CentOS 8 product and takes you to its product overview page with the repositories tab selected.

  2. Create yum repositories

    Creating the repositories

  3. Create an installation medium CentOS 8 Mirror:

    Create an installation medium

    • The Name field (1) should contain a unique and meaningful name, e.g. CentOS 8 Mirror.

    • The Path field (2) specifies the location of the installation media. It supports the inclusion of variables such as $arch, $version, $major, $minor, and $release. Using variables, a single installation medium entry in orcharhino can be used to point to different versions of the installation media for a single distribution. This field would typically be the URL to an internet mirror for the relevant Linux distribution (e.g. http://mirror.example.com/pub/centos/$version/os/$arch) or an NFS path to a copy of an installation disk image (e.g. http://mirror.example.com/pub/iso/centos_8/).

    • The Operating System Family drop down menu (3) assigns an operating system family to the installation media.

    • Clicking Submit (4) saves your changes to orcharhino.

    • Remember to also fill out the Location and Organization context (5) for the new installation media.

  4. Create a content view

    Create a single content view called CentOS 8 comprising the repositories created in the CentOS 8 product and publish a new version.

  5. Create a composite content view

    Create a new composite content view called Composite CentOS 8 comprising the previously published single CentOS 8 content view and further content views of your choice (e.g. CentOS 8 client, EPEL, or Puppet etc.). Publish a new version and promote this version to the lifecycle environment of your choice.

  6. Create an activation key

    Create a new activation key called centos8 and configure it as follows:

    • On the Details tab, assign the correct lifecycle environment and assign the correct composite content view.

    • On the Subscriptions tab, assign the necessary subscriptions (e.g. CentOS 8, EPEL, and Puppet etc).

  7. Create an architecture.

    Depending on your hardware or compute resource provider, you probably want to create an architecture called x86_64.

  8. Create an operating system CentOS 8:

    Create an operating system

    • The Name field (1) requires the name of the operating system coming from Facter, e.g. CentOS.

    • The Major Version field (2) requires the major version of the operating system coming from Facter, e.g. 8.

    • The Minor Version field (3) requires the minor version of the operating system coming from Facter, e.g. 3.

    • You may optionally set an arbitrary Description (4). We recommend using this field to set a human readable name for the operating system.

    • Use the Family drop down menu (5) to assign the proper operating system family to the operating system.

    • The Root Password Hash drop down menu (6) allows you to choose the proper hash function used to hash your root password.

    • Use the Architectures field (7) to associate the operating system with one or more architectures.

    • Operating systems can be associated with additional provisioning elements via the Partition Table, Installation Media, Templates, and Parameters tabs (8) as shown above.

    • Clicking Submit (9) saves the CentOS 8 entry to orcharhino.

  9. Associate the required provisioning templates (e.g. Kickstart default) to your operating system as follows:

    • Navigate to the provisioning templates page and select the template you want to associate with the CentOS 8 operating system.

    • Click on the Associate tab and select the CentOS 8 entry.

  10. Make sure the subscription-manager is in the list of packages to be installed in the provisioning template (e.g. Kickstart default).

  11. Create a hostgroup CentOS 8 and assign the previously created content view, operating system, installation medium and add activation keys to it. You can deploy a CentOS 8 host from this host group.