Future of Spacewalk

Finnur Orn Gudmundsson

Hi,

Since the upstream project has 'officially' shut down ....what is the future of Spacewalk as a management solution for Oracle Linux customers?

Are there any plans to incorporate SUSE Manager instead (or any other tool)?

Bgrds,

Finnur

Avi Miller-Oracle

Support for Spacewalk for Oracle Linux is not dependant on the upstream project. We continue to support Spacewalk and have just released our build of Spacewalk 2.10: https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/announcing-the-release-of-spacewalk-210-for-oracle-linux with source code available at https://github.com/oracle/spacewalk/tree/SPACEWALK-2.10

Spacewalk for Oracle Linux has the same life cycle as Oracle Linux 7, so it will continue to receive support until July 2024. We are already planning a release of Spacewalk 2.11 with improved support for Oracle Linux 8 AppStreams and modules.

Avi Miller-Oracle

Support for Spacewalk for Oracle Linux is not dependant on the upstream project. We continue to support Spacewalk and have just released our build of Spacewalk 2.10: https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/announcing-the-release-of-spacewalk-210-for-oracle-linux with source code available at https://github.com/oracle/spacewalk/tree/SPACEWALK-2.10

Spacewalk for Oracle Linux has the same life cycle as Oracle Linux 7, so it will continue to receive support until July 2024. We are already planning a release of Spacewalk 2.11 with improved support for Oracle Linux 8 AppStreams and modules.

andreas.dijkman

Thank you Avi! I'm looking forward to using this fully with our OL8-clients. Spacewalk 2.10 upstream is at the moment workable but not ideal, so a Oracle-maintained version of Spacewalk would we great!

Is there any testing going on for non-Oracle-databases with this release? I think many users are running Spacewalk with PostgreSQL-databases now as Oracle XE 10g is rather old and Oracle XE 19c hasn't been released yet.

Avi Miller-Oracle

Hey,

andreas.dijkman wrote:Is there any testing going on for non-Oracle-databases with this release? I think many users are running Spacewalk with PostgreSQL-databases now as Oracle XE 10g is rather old and Oracle XE 19c hasn't been released yet.

We do some very limited testing and we've just released a spacewalk-schema update that will allow our release of 2.10 to install (or upgrade) on PostgreSQL systems. However, you should know that if you have an active Oracle Linux support subscription, you get a limited-use license to use Oracle Database 19c Enterprise Edition for Spacewalk: https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/oracle-linux/7/licenses/ol7-lic-restricted.html

No Oracle Linux customers should ever need to use the XE variant for their Spacewalk for Oracle Linux deployment.

andreas.dijkman

Any rules on the usage of Spacewalk if you have 1 system with basic support and you use all your other (for instance) 5000 VM's to get updates from that 1 Spacewalk-server? Or do all systems subscribed to Spacewalk need to have a valid support contract?

I don't hope the answer will be: you should call your local sales rep for this...

Avi Miller-Oracle

andreas.dijkman wrote:Any rules on the usage of Spacewalk if you have 1 system with basic support and you use all your other (for instance) 5000 VM's to get updates from that 1 Spacewalk-server? Or do all systems subscribed to Spacewalk need to have a valid support contract?

Oracle does not require that all instances be covered by a support contract: Oracle Linux is free to download, distribute and use. You only get support for the systems you want to log SRs about. You don't even need a support contract for your Spacewalk instance (though if you don't have one, you don't get the limited use license for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, so be sure to use PostgreSQL in that case). You can also connect all 5000 VMs to get updates from that server. All without paying a cent, if you never want to call us, or you don't want Ksplice.

TL;DR: you don't need support subscriptions for all instances. Go nuts. Tell your friends.

andreas.dijkman

I know, we already do! But the Spacewalk 2.10/2.11 with an Oracle 19c DB under it is rather tempting to get at least one Support Contract. We are already running the upstream Spacewalk 2.10 on OL7 to run all our hosts (go for UEK6!!) but this support-thingy with the restricted use license is a good use-case and costs much less then a separate Oracle DB license.

So before we go and run the Oracle Spacewalk 2.10/2.11 version with an Oracle DB under it I need to know for sure I don't get Oracle Legal and my boss running after me with pitchforks asking for a ton of money (pun intended ;-), because I registered too many clients to that Oracle Spacewalk installation with the restricted use license. I'm already loving Oracle Linux so far with all the updated packages like PHP 7.4 and UEK4 and up.

Avi Miller-Oracle

I would recommend getting Premier support for your Spacewalk Server over Basic. Though Spacewalk is supported with both, you probably should take advantage of Ksplice on that server which requires Premier. Note that while the distribution of packages from yum.oracle.com to servers without a subscription is just fine, the use of Ksplice is limited to servers with Premier support subscription. And if you think UEK is cool, Ksplice will blow your mind.