Red Hat Security: Identity Management and Authentication

An Identity Management (IdM) topology installation requires planning the services (integrated or external), geographical distribution, replication agreements, and installation methods.

The ipa-server package and the optional ipa-server-dns package provide the ipa-server-install command to perform the IdM installation or uninstallation, which can run interactively or unattended.

An IdM client authenticates users who are members of the IdM domain. Although non-Linux clients can authenticate to the domain, Red Hat only supports IdM running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Windows clients can authenticate to the IdM domain but have limited support.

You can enroll clients interactively, unattended, using Ansible, or during a Kickstart installation.

You can scale the size of the IdM topology by adding replicas, which can be installed on a non-domain machine or configured on an existing client.

You can install and manage IdM by using the Ansible materials in the ansible-freeipa RPM, provided by Red Hat in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat recommends using this method for reusability and better support.