Sometimes I need to be able to spin up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) server in a local development environment for testing. For many use-cases spinning up a free Rocky Linux image is sufficient to test in an environment that’s a relatively close facsimile to a RHEL-proper environment. But for those cases where you can’t get around needing to test in a RHEL environment then there’s a need for a RHEL image with a subscription attached. Red Hat’s Developer licenses are good here, with the ability to have up to 16 systems for developer testing. More on this later…

Vagrant is really handy for spinning up servers for testing. A primer on this tool is out of the scope of this post but if you’re not familiar with it I recommend Vagrant’s own tutorials to help get you started.

I use Vagrant + VirtualBox on my Linux Workstation as a local development environment for testing. I’ve found this really helpful for rapidly iterating over things like Ansible scripts among other things. Ansible is declarative and the idea of immutability is important when writing good code. Vagrant makes it easy to spin up and destroy servers so that I know I’m always starting with a system in the same state. Otherwise you could end up with some “configuration drift” as you’re developing…

Installing prerequisites Vagrant and VirtualBox

If you haven’t already, install Vagrant and VirtualBox.

NOTE: Make sure you install the Vagrant compatible version of VB.

Red Hat Developer Subscription

If you don’t have one already, sign up for a free Red Hat Developer Subscription:

NOTE: Make note of your username and password you used when you registered for your account.

Create your project

mkdir vagrant
cd vagrant

Initialize the project. This will create your initial Vagrantfile.

vagrant init

~/vagrant $ vagrant init
A `Vagrantfile` has been placed in this directory. You are now
ready to `vagrant up` your first virtual environment! Please read
the comments in the Vagrantfile as well as documentation on
`vagrantup.com` for more information on using Vagrant.

Install vagrant-registration plugin

Install the vagrant-registration plugin. This is a plugin that we’ll use to automate registering/deregistering our RHEL box whenever we spin it up or tear it down.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-registration

Setup the vagrant-registration configuration

Edit the Vagrantfile you created with the following:

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # vagrant-registration plugin settings
  config.registration.username = ENV['SUB_USERNAME']
  config.registration.password = ENV['SUB_PASSWORD']

  # RHEL box...

end

Configure your Red Hat username and password as variables in your environment:

export SUB_USERNAME="<rhnusername>"
export SUB_PASSWORD="<rhnpassword>"

Configure your RHEL box

Edit the Vagrantfile adding the following code after the registration block.

...

  # RHEL 9 box
  config.vm.box = "generic/rhel9"

end

You’re file should now look like this.

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # vagrant-registration plugin settings
  config.registration.username = ENV['SUB_USERNAME']
  config.registration.password = ENV['SUB_PASSWORD']

  # RHEL 9 box
  config.vm.box = "generic/rhel9"

end

Spin up a RHEL 9 VM

Create and start your RHEL 9 VM.

vagrant up

NOTE: Vagrant automatically registers the new system with Red Hat.

SSH into the machine and verify the subscription.

vagrant ssh

sudo subscription-manager status

You can also see this server registered as an active system in your Red Hat Customer Portal - Subscriptions and then by navigating to the Systems tab:

Destroy…

You can destroy the VM when you’re done testing, or as many times as you need when testing. The vagrant-registration plugin should automatically deregister your instance whenever you destroy (or halt, e.g. vagrant halt) the instance.

vagrant destroy

That’s it!

Additional resources

If you’re interested in taking a peek at how I use Vagrant, feel free to puruse my vagrant repository.

References