Red Hat is open sourcing Project Spacewalk, the Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite code base under the GPLv2 license. RHN Satellite is the stuff behind the Red Hat Network and lets customers manage RHEL updates inside their firewall. It does systems provisioning, updates and monitoring across physical and virtual servers.

Red Hat says that by making Spacewalk open it will be easier for it to incorporate new open source management projects into the future project roadmap citing the open source management projects Cobbler and Koan for provisioning management and the configuration management project, Puppet.

RHN Satellite will still remain a subscription service.

Meanwhile, Red Hat has also bought the code base of open source identity integration provider Identyx to incorporate into something called Red Hat Enterprise IPA, short for Identity, Policy and Audit and an offshoot of the FreeIPA project derived from the old Netscape Directory Server.

IPA – which Red Hat describes as a Linux version of Microsoft’s Active Directory (at least eventually) – centrally manages identity capabilities, single sign-on services, high-availability directory services and synchronization with LDAP, Active Directory and other data stores.

The Identyx stuff should let IPA provide virtual directory services so organizations can deliver a unified view of identity across multiple sources, including LDAP, Network Information Systems (NIS), Active Directory and databases.