Why enterprise management tools

In this chapter we aim to show how useful an enterprise management tool for 

Linux can be if the number of client systems to manage becomes large. Just like 

you need to automate certain tasks when using other operating systems, it is 

also advantageous to do this when using Linux. The two major enterprise 

distributions, Novell/SuSE and Red Hat, both provide options for automating 

client management tasks. We describe their enterprise management tools in this 

appendix.

The tools are designed to manage thousands of clients and hundreds of servers. 

They can be called enterprise tools because all the Linux systems in an 

enterprise can be managed by these systems.

Since both tools have a similar but different approach to the problem of 

managing many systems, we start each  impressions  section on the tool with a 

description of the architecture behind the tool. We also introduce the terms and 

concepts used in each tool. Since both tools are themselves based on complex 

application architectures, we do not go into full detail. This would be a topic for 

another book. Therefore we only give a first impression glance at the tools that 

can be used to manage the Linux client in the enterprise. This should give you a 

good idea of the power of each of the tools.

Although both tools have a Web interface and a command line interface, we 

concentrate on the Web based processes.

Satellite server and Red Hat Network (RHN)

This section describes the Satellite server and its relation to the Red Hat 

Network. This is the preferred architecture for enterprise customers running a 

large number of Red Hat Enterprise installations within their organization.

In this section we look at:

Architecture   Of RHN in general and the Satellite model in particular

Concepts   The terms used in RHN and Satellite like channel, entitlement, 

activation key, and others

First impressions   A first look at the satellite server and how it can be used to 

manage Linux clients within the organization

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Linux Client Migration Cookbook   A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop