RHCSA Test Lab confusion

I have just started into reading Jangs book and I am a little confused on the first two chapters in relation to setting up my system (I have looked at onesaints primer for this book also). I have refrained from carrying out any installation until I read through the first two chapters. I'd appreciate it if anybody currently setting up (or recently setup) a similar test lab, could clarify some points that I am struggling with.

My system is a (totally) blank hard drive (80GB) that I would like to use solely for my RHCSA studies and I am wondering how best to set up my system (following along with Jangs setup).

1) So I have my physical host (mach1), and three virtual guests (server1, tester1, outsider1). Am I understanding this correctly?

2) When it comes to the question of setting up the Functional installation option for the physical host (mach1) I should choose Virtual Host. For server1, tester1 and outsider1, I should choose basic server. Is this correct?

3) When I am installing the OS on the physical host, can / should I use most (if not all) of the hard drive disk space, then limit the size of the VMs on disk to the 12GB that he recommends? Or is there a more recommended alternative setup? (The only scenario I'm used to with virtual machines is that the guests VMs are just one large image file on the hosts partition)

4) When creating the VM for server1, he adds 2 virtual disks of 1GB each. This is being done as it will be used to cover other exam objectives at a later date, correct?

These questions may be a little basic and perhaps could be answered by myself just by getting stuck in to it, but if my understanding is completely incorrect, it might be better if someone else could point it out to me sooner rather than later.

Regards.

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Comments

UnixGuy

When I took the exam, VMs were not part of the test so I can't help you a lot. But in the real world, you need to try these things. When I studied, I installed 2 red hate instances on VMware that was sufficient, one was client and the other was a server.

I'm not sure what the recent version of Jang book say, but you don't have to follow it word by word. Install what's possible for you, and keep trying. Try different scenarios and see what works best.

log32

Michael Jang book's chapter 1 and 2 are a little confusing regarding the lab.
dont break your head overthinking what to do, just install 2 normal installations with a gui and provide them the right IP assignments. and move forward

vasyvasy

Hey KenC,
I went through Jang's book about a year ago and followed the first few chapters to the letter
This is what I can remember off the top of my head:

1) Yes, you can install a physical host (kvm manager, that is) and three separate guests
I just installed one guest and then duplicate them 2 more times

2) Again, this is correct, just remember to select the Virtualization packages for the host (of course, you can add them at a later date)

3) You can use the whole available disk space when configuring the host system, with kvm you will then create virtual hdd space for each of the virtual machine stored as a single file (I think it stores them in /var/lib/kvm/images)

4) The secondary virtual hdd's are used to teach you how to partition, format and mount a partition/hdd in later chapters (using fdisk, parted, and several other tools). Please note that you can add a virtual hdd at any time, not necessarily when creating the vm

Hope this was useful
Cheers

KenC

Very useful vasyvasy, and thanks to all for replies.

I went ahead with install of CentOS, and as I suspected, things became clearer once I did so. Between the exercises and the labs in the book, things were getting a little confusing without having a machine to experiment on. Bit of a delay in replying, as I was not able to look at it for a few days.

One strange problem that set me back even further was the hard disk I was trying to install to:

There were many delays and system hangs during an (unsuccessful) install of physical host OS on the SATA SSD disk that I am using when it is connected on internal SATA port (tried all ports and cables fully seated). When I hooked it up as an external USB drive, install is a breeze and it boots up without issue. Transferring back to internal drive, and it just hangs again. In addition, I have tried other drives (SSD and non-SSD) on any internal SATA port, install and boot proceed without issues. Would love to know what the problem is here.

Onwards...

AceRimmer

Try setting up SATA controller in BIOS(or UEFI) to "Compatibility mode" or "IDE mode".

EDIT: Forget it. I didn't see it is SSD issue.

ally_uk

Control Protocol: Primer on reading Michael Jang's Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide

This should be helpful, I found Jangs book a pain in the ass well the start of it

, The first two chapters are a bit all over the place he keeps jumping the gun and going back to things,

Should of been a alot clearer

JockVSJock

***BUMP***

At first I thought it was me, then search around I realized it wasn't me.

I'm confused on how to partition my virtual hosts along with how to setup LVMs.

kly630

Yeah, one thing that threw me for a loop was those first two chapters as well. Chapter 2 has the installation tasks you need. Chapter 1 doesn't really cover much except what you can expect the networking for your VMs to look like in KVM. Read through both before trying to start any labs. There's also a few missing bits for stuff like setting up vsFTP that you need to google for. modules and things like that you must load because vsFTP won't work with the info Jang provides.

JockVSJock

I'm at work right now and not in front of my laptop where I setup the VMs, however I basically set up three machine like he recommended on page 18/19, with the following:

-12 GB HD (fixed)
-2 GB of Ram
-2 GB of swap
-2 CPUs

-2 of them are servers and one is a desktop

For the HD partitions, I followed the breakdown on pg 18 and I didn't even mess with LVMs and then exercise 1-1 on pg 37 thru me for a loop because it is very vague.

I also googled around a bit last night looks for blogs on how folks set up their labs and there were a few hits, except I was tired and closed out my browser without saving. I will look again tonight and post what I find.

Verities

I was having similar difficulties with his book for initial setup because its not very clear. I decided to wing it and go with 1 virtual host (KVM) and 1 guest, then cloning it 2 times. Its worked fine for me so far, and I've run through the labs multiple times. The key is to get a host up and running with a VM, then be able to setup a VM via Virsh. I suggest doing this multiple times different ways; i.e. 1 host/1 guest, 2 seperate servers and have them all communicate, etc. You'll really learn more by designing and troubleshooting the labs multiple times.

gdsmit1

I'll jump in and say that I'm in the same boat. I'm most of the way through chapter 2 and it's fairly confusing. I did find a lot of advice saying that once I'm past chapter 2 it is much clearer. I guess I can't fault him since he's writing this without knowing the starting point of each reader's computer.

I loaded up CENTOS7 on my system. I created the VM for server1. Created tester 1 through the GUI. Whacked that and attempted to create tester1 via virsh, but it's very different in RHEL7 than in the book. But I was able to create tester1 using the ks file I created in chapter 2.

The VMs are all set up like in the book, 12G drives, 2 additional 1G drives. I wasn't sure how to define CPU use. I have a 4 core Xeon and I assigned 1 core to each of the VMs. In the book he assigned 2 cores. I'm hoping this isn't going to be an issue. I'd have liked to see a better description on how to go about determining what the VM needs.

Verities

gdsmit1 wrote: »

I'll jump in and say that I'm in the same boat. I'm most of the way through chapter 2 and it's fairly confusing. I did find a lot of advice saying that once I'm past chapter 2 it is much clearer. I guess I can't fault him since he's writing this without knowing the starting point of each reader's computer.

I loaded up CENTOS7 on my system. I created the VM for server1. Created tester 1 through the GUI. Whacked that and attempted to create tester1 via virsh, but it's very different in RHEL7 than in the book. But I was able to create tester1 using the ks file I created in chapter 2.

The VMs are all set up like in the book, 12G drives, 2 additional 1G drives. I wasn't sure how to define CPU use. I have a 4 core Xeon and I assigned 1 core to each of the VMs. In the book he assigned 2 cores. I'm hoping this isn't going to be an issue. I'd have liked to see a better description on how to go about determining what the VM needs.

I recommend jumping over to the RHCE resources thread and looking at the various RedHat guides for RHEL 7.

gdsmit1

Yeah, I've been looking through some of those. It's annoying to work through the RHEL6 book studying for the RHEL7 exam, but I think in the long run I'll learn more doing the research to see how to do things differently than in the book.