Problem:

Upgrading from an older version of the satellite (e.g. N-3) to the latest version (e.g. N) is not an easy feat to achieve. Specifically, when there are lots of content hosts present, external capsules are associated with satellite and less downtime can be allocated for upgrade purposes.

Usual blockers for the end-users are:

• Too many steps to perform
• Overall, A bit too much time is needed when multiple N+1 version upgrades are to be done [ specifically when external capsules are involved ]
• Steps for upgrading the satellite with external databases are not very clear
• Complex database content leading to a broken upgrade attempt to N+1 and then several hours ( or even days ) of troubleshooting needed to fix it [ most with users having too many content hosts or too many configurations done in satellite ]

These concerns have resulted in a bad upgrade experience for many end users and some of them even opted for a new satellite installation instead. But again,

• there is no easy way to move the configurations from old to new satellite as well.
• Now every end-user can afford having extra resources allocated for a new satellite [ or several capsule ] related VMs

Ask:

Customers would like to have a process to

• Migrate all configurations from the old satellite to the new satellite by restoring a backup, which will save a significant amount of time and reduce efforts to start satellite configuration from scratch.
  OR
• Support skip-upgrade for both satellite and capsule where the process needs to be as less unattended as possible, users would be able to go from N to N+2 or N+3 versions in a single step/command.