Global – October 12, 2026 -- CIQ Enterprise Linux Manager (ELM) resolves subscription entitlement a single time, at the customer's mirror, whether the fleet has 200 hosts or 20,000.
Subscription authenticates against CIQ Depot at sync time
Customers point ELM at CIQ Depot with their credentials. The RLC Pro subscription governs which repositories they can mirror. Every content view built from that sync inherits the entitlement, as does every host that installs from the view.
The Depot share of the mirror sits alongside internal repositories and open repositories such as Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL). All three sync on the same schedule, and a content view draws from them as one catalog. Mirroring accepts any RPM-based distribution. Curation, dependency resolution and errata cover Enterprise Linux content only.
Hosts install through repository configuration alone
Hosts receive repository configuration through an optional lightweight ELM agent or through a repository file distributed with Ansible. They then resolve the content view version their host group points at and install through standard package management.
CIQ contrasts this with enforcement models that reach the host. Those models require operations teams to run a subscription service, keep it reachable from every network segment that installs packages, and register and reconcile each host as machines join, move or retire. ELM instead requires a mirror, its storage, a sync schedule and curation work, none of which scales with host count. Adding 5,000 machines to a content view leaves the entitlement path unchanged.
Rollouts continue if Depot goes offline
The ELM control plane makes no license callback and sends no telemetry. A Depot interruption delays only the next mirror refresh. A promotion scheduled for Friday still runs, because the required content is already on the mirror.
User access runs on a separate track. ELM has its own accounts and role-based access control, connected to a directory over LDAP or SAML. Administrators set who can curate a view, who can promote it into production and who has read-only access. Disconnected segments resolve entitlement on a connected system before content moves across the boundary.