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RHCE Hardware Requirements?

DoubleNNsDoubleNNs Member Posts: 2,015 ■■■■■□□□□□
in LPI, Red Hat & Linux Foundation
I'm still studying for the 1st half of the Linux+, and the lab servers on Linux Academy + 1 Virtualbox VM has been sufficient so far.

However, I'm wondering - if I wanted to go the RHCSA -> RHCE route afterwards, and build a home lab to study, what type of hardware would I be looking to use?

Is there a CPU/Memory/SSD requirement?

Approximately how many VMs would I need to create? Would it be benficial at all to have an ESXi lab server to practice on, or would spinning up Virtualbox / VMware Player / Linux KVM VMs be more appropriate?
Goals for 2018:
Certs: RHCSA, LFCS: Ubuntu, CNCF CKA, CNCF CKAD | AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Solutions Architect Pro, AWS Certified Security Specialist, GCP Professional Cloud Architect
Learn: Terraform, Kubernetes, Prometheus & Golang | Improve: Docker, Python Programming
To-do | In Progress | Completed
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    asummersasummers Member Posts: 157
    An ESXi server would be best. Any PC from the last few years would be sufficient. A decent amount of RAM (8GB) would be useful.

    I use a HP MicroServer - it has a single 2GHz low-power processor with a single 500GB disk and 10GB of RAM. Runs 4/5 virtual machines very well.
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    $TR1K3R$TR1K3R Member Posts: 30 ■■□□□□□□□□
    I'll also post my lab equipment:

    1 PC with C2D E7500 + 8 GB RAM + 40 GB for CentOS and 320 GB for virtual machines (currently using virtualbox on Win 7)


    3 - 4 virtual machines can be run with this configuration without any problem. Also I usually use two of them at once.
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    DoubleNNsDoubleNNs Member Posts: 2,015 ■■■■■□□□□□
    I have a laptop currently running CentOS 7. i7, 256 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM.
    Seems like I should be able to use that for the Linux+ into the RHCE, so maybe I'll hold off on getting a standalone server until I have a better grasp of core Linux skills and want to do more experimenting.
    Goals for 2018:
    Certs: RHCSA, LFCS: Ubuntu, CNCF CKA, CNCF CKAD | AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Solutions Architect Pro, AWS Certified Security Specialist, GCP Professional Cloud Architect
    Learn: Terraform, Kubernetes, Prometheus & Golang | Improve: Docker, Python Programming
    To-do | In Progress | Completed
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    brombulecbrombulec Member Posts: 186 ■■■□□□□□□□
    I have HP 7800 USFF (1x2core, 4GB ram, 300GB HDD) and it was enough for prepration to the following exams (number of used VMs in parenthesis):
    EX200 (1VM),
    EX300 (2VMs),
    EX413 (2VMs),
    EX436 (4VMs),
    EX401 (3VMs)
    EX210 (4VMs).

    --
    Regards
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    asummersasummers Member Posts: 157
    brombulec wrote: »
    I have HP 7800 USFF (1x2core, 4GB ram, 300GB HDD) and it was enough for prepration to the following exams (number of used VMs in parenthesis):
    EX200 (1VM),
    EX300 (2VMs),
    EX413 (2VMs),
    EX436 (4VMs),
    EX401 (3VMs)
    EX210 (4VMs).

    --
    Regards

    Thank you. That's useful info. Would be nice to know what purposes those VM's served.
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    brombulecbrombulec Member Posts: 186 ■■■□□□□□□□
    No problem :)
    EX200 - VM used as testing ground for installation and configuration
    EX300 - VM1 - server for NFS/SMB/LDAP/Kerberos, VM2- client for services mentioned above
    EX413 - VM1 - IPA Server, VM2 - IPA client + various hardening excercises
    EX436 - VM1-VM3 cluster nodes, VM4 storage node for iSCSI/NFS
    EX401 - VM1 - Satellite Server, VM2 - client for SVN, RPM deployment, VM3 - test machine for kickstart deployment
    EX210 - VM1 - Openstack Node (all services without Nova), VM2-VM4 - Nova Compute nodes.

    Currently I'm working on EX236 with 5 VMS - 1 head node + 4 brick nodes.

    --
    Regards
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    brombulecbrombulec Member Posts: 186 ■■■□□□□□□□
    And one more thing - I'm using KVM on Centos 6 as a hypervisor, but I'm planning to move to KVM on Centos 7.
    Use also KSM for virtual machines on linux - it'll save a lot of memory and has minimal impact on performance.

    --
    Regards
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