by Pete Hnath (Red Hat)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 represents an exciting next step in the continued evolution of the product family and is perhaps the most comprehensive update in the 11 years I've been with the company. New tools such as systemd, firewalld, OpenLMI and others changes the paradigm for enterprise Linux administration by providing greater centralization and automation for the administrator. Other enhancements improve performance, security and scalability. Red Hat Training has substantially updated the RHCE level curriculum to integrate these improvements. The technical changes in the new release are such that even veteran, practicing Linux administrators should consider taking additional training.

In addition to incorporating new technical features from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, major releases provide an opportunity for Red Hat Training to make structural changes to improve our curriculum. Over the past two years we've surveyed our customers, partners and instructors and have been looking forward to the opportunity to make these changes. There are four enhancements I'd like to call out specifically.

1) Red Hat System Administration I (RH124) is the entry point to the Linux curriculum and is the first 5 days of the nine day curriculum leading to RHCSA certification. Based on customer feedback, we have substantially increased the command line administration approaches in the new course, diving right in on day one. In turn we will be retiring the Red Hat Command Line Administration (RH190) course.

2) Following feedback from our certified professionals community, the Red Hat System Administration III course (RH255) has been revised to include several chapters on shell scripting. The course continues to cover key network services such as Apache, DNS, iSCSI and also provides a tech preview of the new container features in Docker.

3) Perhaps the change I'm most excited about is the new Red Hat Certification Lab course (RH300) which replaces the flagship RHCE Rapid Track Course which first ran 15 years ago. The reality is that as Linux has become a true enterprise platform, the requirements to be a Red Hat Certified Engineer have grown commensurately. Red Hat's courses are dense and its simply not possible to cover the thirteen days of content in Red Hat System Administration I, II and III in four days.

The new Red Hat Certification Lab course seeks to meet the very specific needs of students who have completed their training and desire practice before taking the RHCE exam. Students will spend 80-90% of their time "in labs", complimented by a handful of lectures by an instructor on key new functionality like systemd, firewalld and the new boot process. Labs will be self-paced, with the instructor serving more as a teaching assistant as students require assistance. Students will have access to the full set of labs for both the RHCSA Rapid Track course (RH200) and the Red Hat System Administration III (RH255), providing comprehensive coverage for the competencies which are presented in the RHCSA and RHCE exams.

4) Over the past four years live virtual training (VT) and self-paced training have become primary delivery methods for our customers. To address those needs, the updated course materials and labs were redesigned to be completely inter-operable between different modalities, ensuring our customers get the same learning experience. Our self-paced training platform, Red Hat Online Learning (ROLE), is ready to deliver the System Administation I & II courses and the RHCSA Rapid Track globally via six Amazon EC2 data centers. The System Administration III course and the RHCE Certification Lab will be available in coming weeks as will translations of all five courses into eight other languages.

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