Preparing for Red Hat Certified System Administrator in Red Hat OpenStack Certification Exam (EX210)

OpenStack has become the de-facto private cloud solution in today’s market. OpenStack Certified Professionals are in high demand, but for an average IT infrastructure engineer, OpenStack is not simple. The amount of moving parts that are involved in maintaining and operating an OpenStack Cloud infrastructure, makes life difficult.

To become acquainted with OpenStack you can begin by trying it out, taking courses and joining the communities. There are several OpenStack Certifications available, one of which is Red Hat Certification in OpenStack Cloud.

Red Hat OpenStack Certification Exam Levels
Red Hat has two levels of certification available to learn and test your skills in OpenStack.

• EX210 – Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) in Red Hat OpenStack Exam. A set of two courses is available to help you prepare for this exam viz. Red Hat OpenStack Administration I and II (CL110 and CL210).
• EX310 – Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) in Red Hat OpenStack Exam. A course is available for this exam i.e. Red Hat OpenStack Administration III (CL310).

About Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) in Red Hat OpenStack Exam (EX210)
This exam tests the candidate’s skills, knowledge and abilities that areneeded to create, configure and manage private clouds, using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

Pre-requisites

• Candidates for this exam should be RHCSA – RHEL or have comparable work experience and skills (RHCE – RHEL would be even better)
• Candidates should have taken the Red Hat OpenStack Administration I (CL110) and Red Hat OpenStack Administration II (CL210) courses or have comparable work experience using Red Hat OpenStack Platform

Exam Overview
This exam is performance-based exam. Candidates need to perform tasks on a live system, rather than answering questions about how one might perform those tasks.

It tests your skills for:

• Deploy and Configure a Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director
• Manage Users, Projects, Flavors, Roles and Quotas
• Configure and Manage Images
• Configure and Manage Compute Nodes & Networking
• Manage Cinder Storage
• Use Heat Templates to Configure OpenStack Services and Resources

Exam Contents
The certification exam is very comprehensive. It ensures you have a complete hands-on understanding of OpenStack installation and basic operations. All the installation and configuration commands need to be memorized to start with the first task.

After installation is complete either Command Line Interface or Horizon Dashboard can be used to perform the following administrative tasks:

• First task would be deploying and configuring Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director
• Once the nodes are up and running, then administrative tasks like launching instances, addition / deletion / restriction of users with respect to specific projects and roles, needs to be performed
• You would be asked to define public and private network on which, few instances must be launched using some specific image
• Specified volume must be created and attached to the instance
• Floating IP address needs to be assigned to the launched instance and specified behavior must be ensured by implementing a correct set of rules while creating the security group

Summary
Overall the exam is comprehensive and hands-on experience with OpenStack is a must.

Here are some additional tips that can help while planning for this exam:

• Few of the tasks would be inter-related, so it’s always better to read the complete set of questions at the start of the test and define your own strategy to execute the tasks
• Start with the deployment process as soon as test starts and then utilize the installation time to be primed with the answers

The hands-on nature of this exam makes real-world experiences a critical facet of preparation. Duration of this exam is 3 hours. Exam results are emailed within 3 US business days following the exam.

CloudThat Technologies offers a course to help with preparation for this certification click here to know more.

Good luck!

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I will soon write an article on Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) in Red Hat OpenStack Exam (EX310). Stay connected.