Lab Setup

ally_uk

I was looking at learning more about Red Hat and I have Jangs book.

I was going to run Centos on a IBM Think pad laptop then host 2 virtual machines using KVM or virtual box

The question is do you need to learn how to deploy Red Hat for exam purposes i.e Kicjkstart or can I skip this section all together and get a basic lab setup?

How did you guys setup your lab?

Many Thanks

brombulec

For different exams you need different lab set-up.
My setup for exams EX413, EX436: Dell E6410, 8GB RAM, Windows 7 + VirtualBox + 2-4 virtual machines or CentOS 6.x + KVM + 2-4 virtual machines.
For EX300, EX318, EX442 I'm using two small HP 7800 Ultra Small Desktop (each with 2core CPU with HT and VT and 4GB of RAM) - you should use physical computer to correctly set up the hypervisor and use virtual machines.
For EX442 the physical machine is the only reasonable option because this is a tuning exam.
For EX401 you can use virtual machines, for EX210 you should probably use at least one or two physical hosts for OpenStack and a few virtual machines for other services.
As iSCSI/NFS/CIFS file server I'm using virtual machine with OpenFiler, for host machines - CentOS 6.x and Windows 2000 Professional.

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Regards

stryder144

Jang has a companion book that also includes three VMs that are supposed to be set up using KVM. The book is the practice exam one, covering EX200 and EX300.

UnixGuy

When I took the exam I setup two CentOS VMs using VirtualBox. I recommend VirtualBox.

ally_uk

Ok So here is the plan

Host - Windows 7 box Ivybridge 3.5Ghz 8 Gig Ram ( Running Virtual Box)
Server1 - Centos running virtually - HTTP / FTP hosting install files (Kickstart) also running KVM hypervisor
Host 1 - virtual Host running through KVM

The above scenario leaves me with a few questions

If I am running a Centos machine virtually and then run KVM to host virtual machines can I run this through virtual box? virtualization sitting ontop of virtualization is this even possible? isn't something I have tried before.

I wanted to virtualize a second centos host via KVM to test out kickstart and accessing the FTP / HTTP again can this all be done virtually?

VNC SSH? again how would this work can I test it from the Windows Host?

well that's my layout of my intended lab please give me some feedback / criticism and if there is a better way to do it please let me know. I am reluctant to wipe my 7 box as it's my main Rig hence the virtual lab route.