Replicated Red Hat Storage Server Volumes provide you with high-availability, when a single server goes down all your data is still there. Even better, if you were using that server to access your data using the native client it will automatically switch over to a server that is still responding. But what if you want to mount the volume while the server you normally use is down?

When you want to mount a Red Hat Storage Server Volume from your /etc/fstab you normally use a line like this:

storage-server-1:/volume /mnt/volume glusterfs _netdev 0 0

This work great when the storage-server-1 machine is on-line, but fails when it is down. In order to still be able to mount this volume when the specified server is down you can add a backup server like this:

storage-server-1:/volume /mnt/volume glusterfs _netdev,backupvolfile-server=storage-server2 0 0

With the backupvolfile-server option in place your client will now attempt to contact storage-server-2 when storage-server-1 is unreachable.

Learn more about Red Hat Storage Server Volumes in our all-new Red Hat Storage Server Administration (RH236) course.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Below are links to some pages and articles we found this week and really liked.

Red Hat
Check out the latest Guaranteed-to-run course schedule, RedHat
Power Training at Red Hat Summit, RedHat
GUEST POST: Preparing for Red Hat exams, ServicesSpeak
WEBINAR: Learn the 5 critical capabilities for cloud, RedHat
10 certifications that actually mean something, GlobalKnowledge
JBoss BRMS (BPM) car insurance demo, EricSchabell

Open source and technology
Linux code is the benchmark of quality, PCToday
How Linux conquered the Fortune 500, CNNMoney
The next generation digital experience is built on open source, OpenSource.com
Top tech skills for 2013, NextGov
10 top IT skills for 2013 revealed, TimesOfIndia
Inspiring the next generation of IT workers, ITProUK
Moving to cloud computing can be smart decision for government and companies, EconomicTimes
Cloud computing is transforming IT roles and responsibilities, FedScoop

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Why Certify?

The demand for Linux engineers today is growing rapidly with the increase of “cloud” services. More and more organizations want their data to be available everywhere they go with zero downtime to their applications. This kind of demand from organizations requires that engineers know their “stuff” cold. When a web server goes down or a disk fails, you don’t have time to Google for an answer while there is a service outage affecting all of your customers. Becoming Red Hat certified is just one way to set yourself apart when showing potential, or current, employers that you can rise to the challenge.

Red Hat has clearly recognized these types of challenges that engineers and administrators face today when they developed their exams. Instead of the normal Q & A you would expect, these exams are fully hands-on. This lab style exam format helps to set Red Hat apart from other vendors by showing that certified individuals are highly experienced in their roles. For me, having Linux experience is critical to my job and being certified (from multiple vendors) shows expertise to my clients and peers.

Exam Format

The two main Red Hat exams are the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) exam, and the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam. As previously mentioned, each exam is completely hands-on and requires a solid proficiency of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in order to pass. The RHCSA is two and half (2.5) hours long, while the RHCE is two (2) hours.

For those that haven’t take a lab-based exam before, I highly recommend you build a home lab or purchase a training session from Red Hat in order to familiarize yourself with the hands-on lab approach. This is a big adjustment for some when going from multiple choice to having to configure a service or firewall rule (as mentioned in the exam objectives). Building a home lab will also allow you to practice troubleshooting scenarios, time management skills, and try out shortcuts for exam day. Just remember that passing the exam is a culmination of real world experience, time management, and knowing the exam objectives.

Building a Lab

When I decided I was going to take the Red Hat exams I sketched out what kind of lab I was going to build on paper first. The goal was to simulate real world scenarios and networks to build upon my existing Linux skill set and advance my troubleshooting skills further. Having mixed clients wasn’t a requirement for passing the exams, however, it did allow me to simulate different real world clients.

As a side to those that don’t have access to Red Hat installation media, you can download a trial from Red Hat’s website. Some people will substitute Centos for Red Hat in their labs to study, which is fine for around 95% of the exam objectives, but know that there are some objectives which require you to have Red Hat Enterprise Linux installed.

Study Process

Before you even begin to study for the exams you should take a look at the exam objectives and recommended experience requirements listed on Red Hat’s website. Because these exams are hands-on you can’t “guess” your way through the exam by selecting the correct answer. If you feel that you have the required experience your next step is to outline a study plan for each exam. Each person has their own study habits, so study plans are very subjective. For me, I used the following approach to study:

• Print out a copy of the exam objectives
• Build a virtual lab and get each VM up and running with a basic installation
• Work through the online documentation and become familiar with all the basic Linux commands
• Expand each exam objective to include a detailed task list on how to complete the objective
• Know how long it takes going through all the exam objectives to see how long it takes you for each task

As already mentioned the study process is different for each individual so hopefully you learn something from mine and adapt accordingly.

Time Management

As with any exam you will take, time management is critical to doing well on the Red Hat exams. Normally you could divide the number of questions by the time allotted and come up with how long you should spend on each question to complete the exam in time. Unfortunately, with the Red Hat exams being fully hands-on you will have to seriously manage the time you utilize for each task. You should know going into the exam what your weak subject areas are so make sure you leave extra time for troubleshooting and configuration. The number of tasks you are required to perform will also vary on each exam.

Some quick tips for time management include:

• Read through all the tasks quickly once the exam begins
• Mentally break down how long you should spend on each question based on how hard you believe the task is to complete
• Always leave fifteen (15) minutes at the end of your exam for troubleshooting
• If you get stuck on a task, move on and come back to it at the end
• Remember that all of your setup and configuration during the exam must survive a system reboot

The biggest mistake you can make is to spend too much time on a single task and rush through the other tasks on the exam to finish. This will lead to errors in configurations and careless mistakes.

Keep in Touch

Hopefully you found this article useful in understanding what the Red Hat exams are all about and preparing for them. If you want to contact me or ask any follow up questions you can find me on Twitter using the @NightShade003 handle.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Below are links to some pages and articles we found this week and really liked.

Red Hat
Check out the latest Guaranteed-to-run course schedule, RedHat
Power Training at Red Hat Summit, RedHat
What if you could make DevOps easy and reliable?, ServicesSpeak
Red Hat OpenStack is only way to avoid cloud lock-in, V3
Red Hat: The industry’s choice is open or die, ReadWriteWeb
Open source tech is driving big change in government, NextGov

Open source and technology
Australia facing IT skills, ABCNews
How do you educate others on what open source really is, OpenSource.com
Is IT skills gap fact or fiction?, FutureOfCIO
10 most desirable tech skills, BusinessNewsDaily
Cloud and data explosion among big trends for enterprise IT, says survey, CloudTech

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

OpenShift is great! Developers can quickly start development on a new project. Just log into the web console, create a new application, select a gear and start coding. When you are done implementing a feature you push to OpenShift and after a few seconds you can admire and share your work with the whole world.

But there is more to consider when working with OpenShift. What if you develop in teams? Usually applications are not directly deployed into production. How can I implement a staging process harnessing the OpenShift Infrastructure? How do I know if my changes passed an Acceptance Test or failed it? How does a test team know which features have been implemented?

The answer to these questions are usually not easy, and every company has implemented their own set of processes to address these problems. Although some Organizations have automated some of their IT Infrastructure, there are still a lot of manual processes and changes involved when it comes down to taking a particular software release from development into production. On the other hand, the business stakeholders have a high interest into a fast and efficient Release process, because every day that my feature is not in production and available to my users, is lowering my ROI.

The industry has responded to that problem by establishing a process called DevOps. DevOps is a philosophy that stresses the communication, integration and collaboration between software developers and IT operations. DevOps is focussing on the Delivery of Software. DevOps makes everybody involved in the process of releasing software responsible for the success of the delivery. It promotes an agile software development process and tries to reduce the handover delays and communication barriers of siloed teams. By making everybody responsible for a successful Software Release, there is a greater willingness to transfer configuration responsibility from IT Operations to Developers and Developers on the other hand have a better understanding of how their applications are operated in production.

Now wait a minute, isn’t that what OpenShift provides? I as a developer have the possibility to change the configuration of my EAP 6 Instance. Do I have access to other parts of the Runtime Environment? Yes, but only to things that are important for my project for example which JDK Version to use or whether or not to run maven. The other complexities of the Runtime are hidden from me. The underlying Cartridges that provide the functionality are provided through the IT Operations Department. If I need access to change a certain configuration file, IT Operations can make use of the cartridge build lifecycle and decide whether they want to copy the file from my application to its destination or whether they want to merge it with other changes. OpenShift has a well defined Application Lifecycle that is easily extendable.

The cartridge System allows IT Operations to provide mocked service instances to the developer. This enables the IT Operations Department to provide the developer predefined production environments making it easy and fast to reproduce production errors in the developer environment. Wouldn’t it be nice to be handed over an exact replica of the production environment configuration in case you have to troubleshoot a production problem?

Usually it is considered good practice to create a binary application release only once[1]. Then take this binary release and deploy it into your different stages. Everything that is different between the stages should only be configuration files. Adhering to this practice unfolds deployment errors early and give builds confidence that if a deployment fails, that the failure should be in the configuration and not in the binary release.

OpenShift integrates well with jenkins and maven. If you want to adhere to the above principle you can leverage jenkins to create software releases for you and release them to nexus. The OpenShifts RESTful API enables you to implement your staging process deploying only that binary release.

DevOps implementation is no longer a long, complex to implement and a long and cumbersome journey. If DevOps is a Process Description of an Agile and Efficient Enterprise, OpenShift is its Implementation.

[1] This is actually one of the key principles of Continuous Delivery. I do not want to delve into Continuous Delivery here, that will follow in the next article, I just use it as it applies to some extent to DevOps as well.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Below are links to some pages and articles we found this week and really liked.

Red Hat
Power Training at Red Hat Summit, RedHat
2012 EMEA RHCP of the Year: My thoughts on open source, ServicesSpeak
Red Hat renames JBoss Application Server as Wildfly, TheRegister

Open source and technology
Why cloud computing is accelerating in the enterprise, Forbes
Six open source security myths debunked, ZDNet
Open source software isn’t just code, it’s your resume, Wired
Fears of a technology skills shortage, ITV
7 tech trends to watch in 2013, DynamicBusiness
VIDEO: Drowning in Big Data, CoolInfographics

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Long an acquaintance and ally of government institutions, open source is no longer considered rocket science by the enterprise.

Companies find open source attractive because they’re not tied to one vendor, can make improvements in the system at any time and realize cost savings, all helping boost market penetration. And, of course, there’s the benefit of communities continuously improving the products.

In the outside world, governments are strong sponsors of this type of initiative, especially in Brazil, where the use of free and open source software is encouraged to make the market more democratic. And, of course, the market has become increasingly more open to open source. While there were once concerns about the reliability, security, and functionality, those fears are all gone. Red Hat has made it possible to combine the benefits of these technologies with the necessary support for mission-critical environments, developing platforms and the specific demands organizations face.

Open source clearly has the world’s attention right now, and in my view, this will continue for a long time. Through emerging technolgies and especially the cloud, more and more solutions will increasingly rely on open standards. From mobile to aerospace research, open source is everywhere. The only question that remains is at what speed companies incorporate open source technologies into their solutions, as it’s clearly become the best path to success for many organizations.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Below are links to some pages and articles we found this week and really liked.

Red Hat
Power Training at Red Hat Summit, RedHat
Building the intelligent enterprise: easy and inexpensive?, ServicesSpeak
Assessing the current state of your datacenter, ServicesSpeak
Red Hat sets up OpenStack partner network, VARGuy
Red Hat lays out OpenStack strategy, ITBusinessEdge
Proprietary solutions in the enterprise are dead, says Red Hat’s John Mark Walker, SiliconAngle
Red Hat PaaS queen says don’t reinvent the wheel, SiliconAngle

Open source and technology
Open source is taking over the software world, survey says, PCWorld
10 hot IT skills for 2013, TimesOfIndia
Open standards critical for cloud strategy, ZDNet

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The following article originally appeared here in the UK and here in Germany.

Who could have predicted the impact on mainstream businesses of data coming in via social media and mobile technology, the escalating importance of trends such as ‘big data’ or the move towards cloud computing that is now gathering momentum?

The sources of data coming into the enterprise IT infrastructure are proliferating, with new channels and touch-points constantly emerging at an unprecedented rate. Clearly, in an uncertain world, flexibility is a critical component of any business IT strategy.

With today’s customers choosing to interact through multiple channels, businesses are wasting time and budget ‘hand-carrying’ information from application to application, frequently without adding value at best and introducing human error at worst.

Most organisations today don’t lack data; they lack information. Take your average UK bank with a high-street presence. Any one of thousands of customers might choose to interact by phone, post or email, online or in branch at different times. They might have a query about interest rates, request a loan application or ask about remortgaging. If there is someone manually transferring all the data related to this customer that is coming in through different channels, then the bank is wasting an enormous amount of resources. There’s bound to be a time-lag, between data being captured in one part of the organisation and becoming available elsewhere. The result is a lack of joined-up corporate thinking that leads to slow, patchy decision-making and mounting customer frustration.

In contrast, enterprises that are both intelligent and integrated are eliminating unnecessary labour, removing bottlenecks and ensuring a high quality response to every business event. Business rules consistently applied across the organisation improve and automate decision-making, while manual effort is removed. Resources are freed to focus on handling the exceptions and high value transactions that genuinely require their skills.

A different approach through open source

In the past, reliance on proprietary software has meant that developing and maintaining the IT architecture that underlies the intelligent, integrated enterprise has been both complex and expensive. This has made it the preserve of corporations with substantial IT budgets and IT teams. Even these organisations have struggled to implement a genuinely holistic approach, and have often settled for picking the low-hanging fruit, thereby missing out on the opportunities that true integration generates.

Now, open source technology brings the intelligent, integrated enterprise within the reach of mid-tier businesses, by offering straightforward building blocks such as the following.

A readily available open source enterprise data services platform can unify data from multiple sources into trusted, accurate, accountable information assets. The return on data assets is maximised by being able to easily reuse existing data in new applications and business processes.

An open source business rules management system will allow organisations to develop, automate, review, audit and modify business rules so that applications can invoke predefined decision logic. This ensures that every operation from a simple transaction to a complex business event is handled efficiently, consistently and correctly.

Open source business process management and automation means organisations never have to reinvent the wheel, as replicable business process can be identified, standardised and automated.

These and other solutions can be configured to create the intelligent, integrated enterprise, are affordable and come with open source licensing and a subscription purchase model. Red Hat customers, for example, pay a yearly subscription for a certified platform with professional support with high levels of support available within an hour 24×7, rather than paying to use the software. Certification of elements such as Java Virtual Machine, platform and database configurations is included with the subscription, which reduces risk and saves time and money.

In the event of dissatisfaction with the product or support, customers have the freedom to ‘walk’ without incurring high exit costs. This completely changes the customer-supplier dynamic. Proprietary software vendors can view licence fees as a ‘licence to print money’, knowing that inertia will keep many customers locked into their products. It’s a model of doing business that’s guaranteed to keep any vendor on their toes!

Freedom to innovate

Businesses operate against a dramatically changing backdrop and any enterprise today must be adaptable and agile. New technology trends are surfacing all the time: social media is now a source of customer data in mainstream businesses; storing data assets in the cloud has become a reality and these need to be integrated with on-premise assets; while accessing data on the move through mobile technology has taken off in an unprecedented way.

Here again, open source has advantages over proprietary software. An intelligent, integrated enterprise built on open source technology has the flexibility to support an evolutionary approach. Open source provides an adaptable platform, ready for whatever advances lie ahead in terms of capturing, storing and accessing enterprise data. It leaves the organisation free to adopt emerging technology to match new requirements and integrate new applications, while protecting previous infrastructure investments.

Security built in

‘Open’ does not equate to ‘exposed’ and sharing data across an organisation has to be done on a need-to-know basis, with users being authorised to view only certain data and with the business being able to monitor who is accessing data at all times. Red Hat and JBoss middleware solutions are accredited to operate in some of the world’s most exacting, security-driven environments.

The advantages of collaboration

In Red Hat’s case, by the time our software is released, it will have been put through its paces by the worldwide open source community. Any weaknesses or vulnerabilities in the software are quickly identified and eradicated during the development process. It will also have been battle-hardened through an intensive, rigorous testing and certification process. There is a significant contrast between the open source philosophy of world-wide collaboration and the small teams typically engaged in developing on proprietary software.

For those organisations that have already adopted open source solutions, using Red Hat software offers the best of both worlds: software developed by a vibrant open source community, backed by enterprise-class testing, certification, documentation, training and support.

Below are links to some pages and articles we found this week and really liked.

Red Hat
Power Training at Red Hat Summit, RedHat
JBoss Certification News, ServicesSpeak
WEBINAR: Five must-haves for your enterprise PaaS, RedHat
JBoss Data Grid 6.1: High availability, faster recovery, CRN
Red Hat’s John Mark Walker: The open cloud needs storage, Linux.com
Red Hat Product President Talks OpenStack, Public Cloud, TalkinCloud
Red Hat announces RDO and Open Stack partner program, Tech Crunch

Open source and technology
DaaS, MaaS, DraaS: The next phase of cloud computing, ReadWriteWeb
U.S. lacks tech skills, TimesUnion
Report: IT jobs still in high demand, but skills in short supply, ComputerWorldUK

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.