RHA learning environment/labs on a RasPi?

[Jens]

Since RHEL is avaibale on the ARM Platform, would it be possible to get a RHA learning/lab environement for the RHEL Syadmin I, II and III courses running on a RasPi?

[AshutoshBhakare]

I dont think so as we have VM with 4+4 GB RAM running on baremetal. Resources will be very less. 

[BrianTheWall]

I agree the bandwidth required to run all the workstations could make it problematic. But it might be worth looking into a lab where Raspberry Pis were pooled to create a super server. There is a possibility there. Good food for thought.

[candidocaio]

The laboratories have minimum numbers to function. You have to check the list of RHA prerequisites. If you meet a quantity of memory and disk. It's simpler for you to work with.

[ralii]

Hi Jens,

I am the creator of UCF/lab environment for Red Hat.

The use of ARM is not currently on our roadmap to create, but I am not adverse.

Do you see this as something that the "general RHA community" would be able to use in the classroom? Or is this more about making it much more accessible outside the classroom?

I am honestly curious as to what we, Red Hat, should be offering for non-classroom access for the RHA community.

Currently we are x86_64 based and expect, depending on course, certain amounts of disk space and memory requirements. We also currently require a centralized classroom instructor system to be the "source" of a lot of materlal.

Thoughts?

--Rob

Highlander of UCF

[Bill]

Note this:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/piserver/
I think the idea is that a student could easily have multiple clients running in front of them while client/server labs could be run off the x86 server environment. This would reduce or eliminate the need for high-end client host machines with extensive RAM to run multi-guest VMs

[BrianTheWall]

 I just read this. This is absolutely brilliant! I cannot wait to try setting this up. I like the concept of doing it on x86 machine to save on the "high life" of x64 technology. It seemed for a while there was no hope for anyone using x86 anymore, and now this. So far they seem to have done it with Debian so I am curious to see how it may work with Redhat OS. I will look further. This ..if works can save a lot of time not setting up cluncky desktops. Thank you for sharing, Bill.

[AshutoshBhakare]

I guess that could be use in the form of BYOD. But doing so any lab commands from e-contents will not work

[LLRobinson]

Ths only thing I'd would warn about is the ability to rebuild a students machine when they accidentally destroy the root partition. Part of the reason RH went with vm's was that it reduced the time to go from broken to fixed. If your teaching on RPi's you'd really want some spare SD cards to quickly plug in when someones messed up creating or deleting a partition.

[Bill]

Actually, the point of the PiServer is to eliminate the SD card and move to an image based distributed environment with saved namespaces, etc... That might actually make using the SD cards an option when doing the disk management labs.