My organization has a variety of RHEL 5/6/7 servers in an offline environment, so we have to manage our own yum repos.

What will be the best yum architecture for us:
1) One big yum repository for every major version (5,6,7)
2) Small repo for each minor version (7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3)

Advantages:
One big repo
yum update will take the newest package every time.
rpm versions conflicts?

Small repos
small, fast and compact repo for every server

Disadvantages:
One big repo
big yum cache file?
long yum queries?
Tens of thousands of packages

Small repos
yum update will not get the latest package

Thoughts?

if I were you I shouldn't mix them

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi,

Even, if your environment is offline, you will still need (or are already using) an online machine to get the yum packages.

For your problem Red Hat has solutions.
With Red Hat Satellite you can have one machine get the required packages and avail them for the other offline machines.
Talk to them, as surely you have a valid subscription for using their products.

for RHEL 5.11 RHEL 6.8 and RHEL 7.3

use the REDHAT repos !!!!

and contact redhat support for installing and CONFIGURING!!!!!!!!
"yum-protectbase" ( rhel5 and 6)
and for
"yum-priorites" for rhel5,6, 7 )

if you use any third party repos

using them might null and void your support contract
so contact redhat support

OP here,

After using both methods for a while, I would definitely recommend using small repositories.
Which means a repo for each of minor versions (ex: 6.5,7.3..), and not one big repo for each major version (ex: 5,6,7)

Upgrading some packages resulted with some irritating dependencies errors.