Experience in preparing for the RHCVA (Red Hat Certified Virtualizaion Administrator) exam

Not so long ago, I was lucky to take the Red Hat Virtualization (RH-318) course and take part in passing the corresponding RHCVA exam - Red Hat Certified Virtualization Administrator (EX-318). Unfortunately, I did not find similar topics on Habré, therefore I will share my own experience in preparing for the exam.

For obvious reasons, I can’t disclose information about the exam, its contents, so I will use exclusively open sources, which are enough to be ready at the right time.

The EX-318 exam is designed for professionals who want to prove their knowledge and skills in managing virtualization from Red Hat, and it is also included in the line of certifications required to obtain RHCA status - Datacenter (Red Hat Certified Architect). For those who are interested in the status of an architect, see here .

This exam Red Hat recommends passing IT to RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator) level specialists or specialists with similar knowledge expressed in several years of Linux systems administration.

If you decipher this sentence and impose your own experience on top, then the entry threshold is approximately the following:

1. You need to be familiar with virtualization (it is not necessary to know how KVM works for this, but you should know the general principles);
2. You must be familiar with technologies such as FC, NFS, iSCSI;
3. You must have at least a basic understanding of networks, understand what VLAN, Bonding is;
4. A little understanding of Linux systems and the basics of working in the CLI. Since virtualization is from Red Hat, we will mean Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS;
5. Know and be able to use yum, less, grep, wget, rpm, vi.

I deliberately used the words “to be familiar” and “to understand a little”, because in order to start working with this virtualization, it is not necessary to be an advanced administrator of Linux systems, and a network and storage guru.

About preparing for this exam

Suppose we are familiar with all of the above points, it remains to deal with virtualization itself.

On the Red Hat website you can see a list of the necessary skills that are useful for passing the exam:

1. Installing Red Hat Virtualization Manager (RHEVM);
2. Installation and configuration of the RHV hypervisor;
3. Creating a virtual data center, connecting hosts, disk storages, setting up a network;
4. User and role management;
5. Import of installation media;
6. Creation of virtual machines, templates and VM pools;
7. Management and portal management.

The most faithful and reliable option for passing is the RH-318 Red Hat Virtualization course, which explains most of the aspects of this virtualization system, as well as the corresponding practical skills in deploying the control part, hypervisors and virtual machines. I would highly recommend pre-attending this course.

Self preparation

The Red Hat portal has a great library for all products, including Red Hat Virtualization. From the entire large list, I would recommend reading the following documents:

1. Red Hat Enterprise Linux. System Administrator's Guide . For those unfamiliar with RHEL, or for those wishing to refresh their knowledge;
2. Installation Guide . Installation and configuration of Red Hat Virtualization Manager;
3. Introduction to the Administration Portal . Admin Portal, Appearance and Navigation;
4. Administration Guide . Actually, the most important document on system administration;
5. Introduction to the User Portal. User portal. Appearance and basics of navigation;
6. Virtual Machine Management Guide . Virtual machine management;
7. Technical Reference . For those wishing to dig a little deeper. A more detailed description of the architecture and how it all works.

While studying the documentation, I highly recommend that you take out the most interesting information and what is “easy to forget in a couple of days” in a separate cheat sheet to quickly remember when you need it. This is a great option for saving commands, parameters, keys, paths and more.

At the time of reading the documentation, the best option would be to check everything read in practice. A pair of servers / virtual machines and a common storage are enough for a test bench. If possible, it is better to use all storage connectivity options, but if FC can be omitted, I highly recommend working with NFS and iSCSI.

In order to try it all in action, there are two options:

Register on the Red Hat portal using your corporate account and get trial licenses for Enterprise Linux, as well as for Red Hat Virtualization. Using the licenses obtained, with the help of guides, you can easily practice setting up the system and managing virtual machines. This option is somewhat more complicated, because you will still need to get acquainted with the subscription manager, but if you seriously deal with Red Hat products, you will have to learn this and that, moreover, all the necessary steps are described in the RHV documentation.

The second option is to use CentOS 7 and the oVirt virtualization system. For me, this option is more acceptable, given the small difference between the Red Hat products and the systems from which they grow. The difference in setting up and managing the virtualization environment will be minimal, and the need to use trial licenses is no longer necessary, virtualization will work and be updated without subscriptions.

A short document on the oVirt website describes how to install the system on RHEL / Fedora / CentOS. All further system management steps are similar or as close as possible to the documentation provided on the Red Hat portal.

In custody

That's all I wanted to say about preparing for this exam. Knowledge of virtualization technologies and Linux systems will be a big plus in preparation, and reading documentation and practice is almost a success.
Even if you do not have plans for passing this exam, according to the documents provided in this article, you can safely deploy your virtualization and practice (maybe someone will like it). Well, to those who are going to take this exam, I wish you good luck. I hope that this information will be useful to you.

Little nuances

Virtualization system version 4 has already been released, while the exam for the new version is still missing and is available only for version 3.5. There is no fundamental difference between version 4 and 3.5, therefore, I advise you to immediately read the documentation for the new version, this should not have a major impact on the exam.

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PS: I urge you not to start a debate about which virtualization is better, this article describes only the preparation process and does not call you to abandon anything in favor of Red Hat solutions.