Before diving into system registration, take some time to set up a new organization and think through your workflow. You will have a better long-term experience by doing this work up front instead of trying to retrofit it. Managing when and how patches and updates from Red Hat are made available to systems and environments is one of the strongest arguments one can make for bringing Satellite into your shop.

tl;dr: DB and RPM storage are the big system design concerns, not memory or OS install. Average channel size is up to 15K packages at 250KB per, meaning 3.5GB of DB table space per channel. Actual RPM storage is about 30GB per channel. Make sure you can grow each partition easily.

I'll be posting a series of articles on tips, tricks and considerations on Red Hat's RHN Satellite system life-cycle management tool. Each new post will get a link here, so they'll be easy to find. I'll be putting things I've learned from my own mis-steps, inside track from friends inside Red Hat, and perspectives gained from talking with others who work with RHN Satellite on a daily basis.