Data Center Automation with orcharhino: Manage Hosts running Enterprise Linux 9

Today, ATIX introduces orcharhino 6.1. The release includes numerous new features and stability improvements. orcharhino now additionally supports managed hosts running AlmaLinux 9, CentOS Stream 9, Oracle Linux 9, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, and Rocky Linux 9. Additionally, there are now orcharhino Clients for SLES 15 SP4 for both x86_64 and ppc64le architecture.

Some functionality regarding consuming content on managed hosts is now part of ’subscription-manager‘. Therefore, ‚katello-host-tools‘ is no longer installed by default. For more information, see Installing katello-host-tools-tracer Manually and Installing katello-host-tools-tracer during Provisioning in the orcharhino documentation.

The SCC Manager, an orcharhino Plugin created and maintained by ATIX to import software packages from SUSE Customer Center, has been completely redesigned. Users can now filter SUSE products based on category, version, and architecture. This helps importing products into orcharhino and simplifies managing hosts running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

orcharhino Subscription Key provides a convenient way to see if orcharhino usage is compliant with orcharhino subscription. It gives users a visual notification if their subscription has expired or if their number of managed hosts is higher than their current active subscription.

The Puppet plugin is now optional within orcharhino Web Installer. Users who solely rely on Ansible or Salt to configure managed hosts can run their orcharhino instance without the Puppet plugin. During installation, there is a new option to download the user-provided values as ‚answers.yaml‘ file, which can be reused during another orcharhino installation.

orcharhino 6.1 completes a major version bump of the used open-source base components, including the upgrade to Foreman 3.1 and Katello 4.3. The new version also contains a job template to patch managed systems running Microsoft Windows using Ansible.

The documentation contains a new procedure to install Puppet on orcharhino Proxies as well as managing DHCP and DNS with orcharhino Proxies. Users can follow a procedure to use custom users for remote execution and change the default SSH key on orcharhino Server and orcharhino Proxies used for remote execution. There is a new guide to use HTTP proxies with orcharhino, a procedure to delete tasks based on their ID within orcharhino, and a procedure to install Pulp CLI on orcharhino Server.

orcharhino is used to automate on-premises and cloud-based IT environments and is based on the open-source software Foreman. It can be used to automatically provision and configure hosts and to continuously provide them with software including security errata. orcharhino supports AlmaLinux, Amazon Linux, CentOS, Debian, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rocky Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Ubuntu. ATIX AG is based in Garching near Munich.