This book is designed to accompany the freely available RHEL7 RHCSA Course on by ComposeCode on YouTube. This text includes the examples used in the videos and serves as an offline reference or revision guide for the exam.
NOTE: The actual content of the RHCSA is not discussed here as to do so would would break the terms and conditions of the exam provided by Red Hat, Inc. The content of this guide has been written based on course outline for the RHCSA which can be found on the Red Hat training website. The exam is constantly evolving for each release of RHEL and there will be differences between current (RHEL7) previous (RHEL5,6) and new iterations of the exam.
The exam duration is 2.5 hours and can be sat either in a classroom environment or at a Kiosk. Both offerings can be booked online through the Red Hat website.
The test itself is performance based and hands-on, not a multiple choice or paper based exam which some vendors provide. The exam is performed in an offline environment so access to the internet is not provided.
In order to study for this exam you will need a decent machine capable of running several virtual machines. A dual-core processor with hardware virtualization support should suffice, but a modern quad-core processor is recommended. The more ram you have, the easier the exercises will be to complete. Around 100GB of disk space should suffice for the virtual machines. You don't specifically need a subscription for RHEL7 but it would help, CentOS or Scientific Linux will suffice instead.
NOTE: Red Hat now provide free RHEL subscriptions for developers which may be used instead (http://developers.redhat.com/downloads/). However, it is currently locked to one subscription per email address so you will need to request multiple subscriptions through multiple email addresses or reuse the single subscription.
Calvin Hartwell ([email protected]).