From: howard d. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > He was talking about the cost of HW for certification > exams.... > I think those costs are more than halved with Virtual > Machines and templated setups
What do you think Red Hat uses? ;) Their exams are automated, some even using virtualized setups when multiple machines are required. But the location is still physical, not remote virtual. There are many limitations of remote, virtual testing. So much so that Cisco also has that same issue as Red Hat. > I am not trying to offer a marketing message here.... I was > at Oracle OpenWorld and they changed out lab set ups in 30 > minutes by running it in a VM. Have you been to any Red Hat events lately? ;) I mean, Red Hat markets Xen through RHEL, showed off a USB key-based KVM for RHEL, and runs a lot of stuff on it for a reason (let alone just finally bought the company that has the majority of the KVM developers). In fact, all of Oracle's stuff is based on all of Red Hat's developments. They've just built some fancy GUIs around it. They are into solving the "upper stack" aspects, whereas Red Hat is more involved with the lower platform + middleware. > They had something like 30 labs net in 6 rooms, some > repeated. But an entire VM > - with app servers and/or DBs - could be copied to a 1 or 2 > GB USB drive. They said > that by going to a VM infrastructure they could run 3x the > number of classes on half the HW they had. How do you think the Red Hat Certified Instructors / Examiners (RHCI/RHCX) still catch their flight on Friday night after people finish the exams mid-afternoon? Do you think they manually grade the things? Ha! How about setting up the lab Thursday night after the class ends for the Friday exam without staying up all night? ;) The "cost" isn't their time. The "cost" are the facilities and the computers involved, even if much of it is virtualized, automated, etc... I mean, Red Hat _does_ "outsource" some training. If they didn't have things automated, there is _no_way_ they could do that. Red Hat also uses virtualized training now: https://www.redhat.com/elearning/virtual_training/ It uses the same technology Red Hat uses for all their web-based interaction, all open source. People call it a true "WebX replacement" (and then some ;). > That should be pushing down the costs of the exams, unless > some one is seeking doubled profits from certification exams. People have been accusing Red Hat of doing that for years. But anyone who actually reads their public filings knows that their training margins are far lower than subscriptions and many other services. Red Hat is still trying to find an avenue for virtual testing. Unfortunately, just like Cisco on the CCIE, it's damn near impossible to find anything close. I know Novell has some virtualized testing, but Red Hat hasn't found the right balance for itself yet. _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list [email protected] http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
