Questions about KVM in RHCSA exam

bchoi0000

During the exam, is it more practical to use the Virtual Machine Manager GUI in Gnome or use CLI, like virsh, qemu-img, etc?

Is it more practical to stay only in the console during the entire exam, or should some things be done in Gnome desktop?

Thanks! Hope answering this does not violate NDA!

lordy

I think there is no precise answer. However I think I can share my experience from my exam with you:

I had one task that required me to create a rather complex configuration. I knew which config-file to edit and I had a good idea what settings I would need to change but it was immediately clear to me that it would require me to read the man page for this config-file and do a lot of testing, probably with trial-and-error.

I then fired up the GUI for this task, which I had never used before, and used the kind of setup wizard it offered. That took only 2 minutes and I was almost done.

The GUI tools can be a huge time-saver on some tasks. If you think that a task is very complex, start out with the GUI and do small changes through the CLI if necessary. But for the vast majority of tasks you should be just fine with the CLI.

bchoi0000

thanks lordy! i think like a lot of people i am not comfortable with GUI's because u don't know what they really do to the system. they might screw everything up. but if there's time pressure, then u might have to try them.

lordy

Well, if you know your stuff there isn't much time pressure on RHCSA.

I wasted a lot of time on two questions and still had the time to double and triple-check at the end.
On the other hand I guess that using the GUI for one task safed me at least 15 minutes.

thedude666

bchoi0000 wrote: »

thanks lordy! i think like a lot of people i am not comfortable with GUI's because u don't know what they really do to the system. they might screw everything up. but if there's time pressure, then u might have to try them.

I totally agree with you on wanting to know what the gui is doing.
However there are a very few areas where the GUIs can be good.

I'm especially thinking about Kickstart configuration. (do note that I don't violate the NDA as I didn't took the exam )
There are alot of directives in there and writing one totally manually would take some time that can be saved to something else like double/triple checking your stuff.
When I see the config itself I can see if it is what I expect, it is just difficult to remember the syntax of each directive.

NightShade03

I agree with the above posts. Just remember there is always more than one way to skin a cat and the exam is looking at the end results...not how you achieved it.