RHCE Lab Setup with Vagrant + RHEL 9 (Free + Beginner-Friendly)

[SunnyN]

I wanted to share my RHCE practice lab setup to help anyone preparing for the exam or learning Ansible automation on RHEL.

I built a lightweight, repeatable Ansible lab using Vagrant, VirtualBox, and RHEL 9 — perfect for local testing and skill-building. The entire environment spins up in just a few minutes.

It provisions:

️ 1 control node
️ 2 managed nodes
All on a private network, with a shared playbooks/ folder, SSH key setup, and a sample inventory so you can test Ansible connectivity right away.

Requirements:

• Around 8GB RAM on your local machine

• Vagrant + VirtualBox

• A free Red Hat Developer account

Only the control node needs to be registered ; the others can be used for hands-on Ansible practice.

Here’s the GitHub repo with setup scripts, README, and architecture overview:
https://github.com/sunnynwosu/rhce-vagrant-lab

Hope this saves you time and helps with your Ansible or RHCE prep!

Feel free to clone, adapt, or share how you customized the lab. Any setup issues or ideas? Let me know.

Happy to hear feedback or suggestions!

Good luck on your RHCE journey!

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

@SunnyN Nice, thanks!

[SunnyN]

Appreciate it.

[TudorRaduta]

@SunnyN thanks for sharing this, it’s a great, practical setup and a big help for anyone prepping for RHCE or diving into Ansible on RHEL. Appreciate you for making it available to the community!

[SunnyN]

Thanks! Glad it’s useful to the community.