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I get so many emails everyday, asking how to prepare for RHCE. Some ask what all hardware / number of PCs we need to practice for RHCE. Well, in this article, I have decided to give you few tips just for that. Don't expect that I will be telling you exam questions or dumps of RHCE. I will not answer any such email (or phone). First of all the hardware resources issue. Well, I recall the days when I was studying computer sciences back in 1993, and our instructor used to ask in the beginning of each new class, "Do you have a computer at home? If you don't I would suggest you to go to a friend who has, and practice these things on that available PC" . Time passed and when I started conducting RHCE courses, my question used to be: "Do you have at least two computers at home? If not, I suggest you buy a couple of inexpensive Pentium 2 computers, so you can practice your RHCE labs" . But buying extra computer and then placing it in home, buying and placing extra monitor, keyboard mouse and most importantly a network switch, was not possible for many. It is still not for many. For either financial reason or the un-availability of space in the room. Anyway, to all system administrators out there, who are either preparing for any upcoming professional exam, involving networking / multiple computers, or just want to practice or test our various system administration skills on Linux, or wintendo, the answer is "VMware". First thing that you need is a PC or laptop computer, with enough CPU power, 1.x GHz or higher, at least 512 MB RAM (I recommend at least 1 GB for decent performance), and some free disk space ( I am not talking about free partition area). Then, what you can do is, download the free (evaluation) version of latest VMware Workstation from www.vmware.com , for the operating system you prefer to use for your base operating system of your PC/ laptop. Next you can install the downloaded VMware workstation on your base operating system and create multiple Virtual Machines, within that upto your hearts content. For RHCE, there are two scenarios, but again, you can create more or less then what I show you here. If you use wintendo as your base OS, you can create two (or more) linux virtual machines. That is enough to test your RHCE labs. If you are are using Linux as your base OS, again you can create two (or more) machines, one for another linux (virtual) machine and the other virtual machine for wintendo. Linux virtual machines can be set to use only 128 MB of RAM and a 2 GB of disk file is enough. For wintendo virtual machines, I would recommend setting at least 256 MB of RAM and 3 GB (or more) disk space for virtual machine disk file. Update: If you don't want to run VMware, (which is perfectly understandable) , then you can try the following . They are really EXCELLENT:- XEN (not xenserver), available in RHEL 5.x, CENTOS 5.x and Fedora 8. (Not available in later versions of Fedora. Dropped in favor of KVM). Supports Para and Full Virtualization solution KVM (Available in RHEL 5.3, CENTOS 5.3, Fedora 9 - 11 . (Needs special VT flags to be present in CPU. Needs latest CPUs for short). Full Virtualization only. VirtualBox from Sun Microsystems. This is such an excellent tool that I just fell in love with it, along XEN and KVM of-course. This is quite a mature software. Supports virtual bios configurations and boot from PXE, etc.
In this way, you can run multiple machines, within one physical computer, without needing to buy any piece of extra hardware. Your desk will look as neat as it would normally. And your mom or wife or room-mate will not get angry at you either! That is the best part. Isn't it? Ok. That goes for the requirement of multiple machines. Just increase the amount of RAM you have in your computer. And you will be a happy (virtual) user /admin! What Linux flavour to use for practice ? Well, since everyone cannot find RHEL 5, I would recommend to use CENTOS 5.x. It is 100% RHEL, only the name is changed. You can download the latest version of CENTOS from http://www.centos.org . Update:
Some people have told me that my CBTs on System Breakup and System Repair (part 1 and part 2) are very helpful for the first part of RHCE . (Unfortunately they are in Urdu at the moment). Some claim that my book Linux Pocket Reference (in English) is also quite helpful for server side preparations. Next, is the tip for all system admins out there who go out to friends or client sides to troubleshoot their network or server connectivity, etc. I am sure that you would love to have this "5 in 1" network cable mentioned at http://www.ossmann.com/5-in-1.html. And whenever you are forgetting network cable configuration, you can refer to this link for help. This is the guy who makes "TrainSignal" videos / CBTs. And till now, I have found his CBTs, the best, compared to CBT nuggets, or others. Ma' ssalama
Kamran
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