Red Hat Training

First, what you are actually buying

These are Red Hat’s classes. ISInc is an authorized Red Hat training partner, which means the courseware is Red Hat’s, the labs are Red Hat’s, and the instructor is a Red Hat professional rather than somebody we trained to teach it. There is no ISInc version of Red Hat System Administration I. There is the class, and we are one of the places you can buy it.

That is worth saying plainly because the obvious question is why not buy it from Red Hat. The class is the same either way. What changes is the paperwork: you can put it on your existing account with us, spend training credits you already hold, buy it through a contract vehicle if you are a government buyer, and get one invoice for your Red Hat training alongside everything else you take with us. If none of that matters to you, buy it wherever is easiest. If you already buy training from us, it matters quite a lot.

How our classes are delivered covers what a seat includes and how organizations buy them.

What a seat actually includes

Red Hat sells these as Learning Subscriptions rather than as a seat in a room, and the difference matters before you compare our price with anybody else’s. One subscription covers one course, and it runs for a year.

In that year you get the live instructor-led class, self-paced access to the same material so you can go back over any of it, 100 hours of hands-on lab time, and one certification exam attempt plus one retake, with the readiness tools that go alongside them.

So the thing to compare is not a week against a week. A cheaper class elsewhere is four days in a room and a set of notes you will not open again. This is the same four days, plus a year to consolidate them, plus the lab hours to practice on, plus the exam and a second attempt if the first one does not go your way.

That last part is worth more here than it would be almost anywhere else, for the reason in the next section.

Before anything else: the exams are not like other exams

If you are coming from CompTIA or Microsoft, this will reset your expectations, and it is better to reset them now than three weeks before you sit one.

Red Hat certification exams are performance based. There are no multiple choice questions. You are put in front of real systems and given tasks, and you pass by making the systems work. Nothing you have memorized helps if you cannot do the thing.

Two consequences follow, and both are in your favor. Studying means practicing on a machine rather than reading, which is exactly what the hundred lab hours are for: they are the preparation, not a bonus. And the certification means something specific to a hiring manager, because it cannot be passed by somebody who has only read about it.

It also explains why the included retake is not a throwaway line. A performance based exam is unforgiving of a bad morning in a way a multiple choice paper is not, and knowing you have a second attempt already paid for changes how the first one feels.

If you are new to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Start at the beginning, and take it in two parts. System Administration I assumes no Linux at all: the command line, files and permissions, users, processes, networking basics. System Administration II builds on it and takes you to the point where you could run a server somebody depends on.

Together they prepare you for RHCSA, which is the certification everything else in Red Hat’s world is built on top of.

Take these two if Linux is new to you, even if you are experienced elsewhere. Being a strong Windows administrator does not shorten this path as much as people expect it will.

If you already use Linux every day

Then the two courses above will bore you for the first three days, and there is a course built for exactly that problem. RHCSA Rapid Track covers the same ground as both, at pace, for people who already work in Linux and want the certification rather than the education.

Be honest with yourself about this one, because it is the single most common mistake on this page and it goes wrong in both directions.

Rapid Track is one course instead of two, so it is a week rather than two weeks away from your actual job. That makes it tempting for people who should not take it. The test is not whether you have used Linux, it is whether you are comfortable at the command line without looking things up constantly: permissions, file systems, systemd, a text editor you can actually drive. If you would hesitate at any of those, the pair will get you further, and you will pass the exam rather than re-sit it.

And the other direction: if you have administered Linux for years and you take the pair anyway, you will spend a week being told things you already know. Ask us if you are genuinely unsure. We would rather put you in the right one.

One thing does tilt this slightly toward Rapid Track for anybody on the fence, and it is new. The subscription gives you a year of self-paced access to the material and a hundred lab hours, so a gap you hit during the week is a gap you can close afterward rather than one you carry into the exam.

If you have RHCSA and want RHCE

Here is the thing that surprises people who held an RHCE years ago and are coming back: RHCE means automation now. It is not the old advanced sysadmin exam with more services on it. It is Ansible.

Which is a reasonable change, because that is what the job became. But if you are picturing the certification you remember, picture a different one.

RHCSA comes first and is not optional: you cannot hold RHCE without it. If you are already automating and only need the credential, that is still the class, because the exam is performance based and it tests Ansible the way Red Hat expects it to be written.

If automation is the whole job

Past the certification path there is a set of courses about Ansible Automation Platform as a product rather than as a skill: running it for an organization, and pointing it at things that are not Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers.

Take the Ansible course above these first. All three assume you can already write a playbook.

If containers are the actual problem

This is a different road, not a further step along the last one. People arrive wanting Kubernetes and get sold system administration, which is a waste of a week, so it is worth being clear: you do not need RHCSA to start with OpenShift.

Where you start depends on which side of it you are on. Administrators run the cluster. Developers put applications on it. Red Hat splits the courses that way and the titles do not make it obvious.

And if your interest in OpenShift is running virtual machines on it rather than containers, which is increasingly why people are looking at it, that is its own course.

If you already run Red Hat and need one specific thing

These assume RHCSA level knowledge and a production estate. Each one is a single subject taken seriously, and you take one because you have a problem rather than because you are working through a path.

The short version

• New to LinuxSystem Administration I, then II
• Use Linux daily, want RHCSARHCSA Rapid Track
• Have RHCSA, want RHCEAutomation with Ansible
• Automating Windows or network kitthe matching Ansible Platform course
• Containers are newDevelopment I, the Podman course
• Running a Kubernetes clusterOpenShift Administration I
• Building apps for KubernetesOpenShift Developer II
• Consolidating virtual machinesOpenShift Virtualization
• One specific production problemthe specialist course for it

Training a team

Red Hat courses are among the most expensive per seat we sell, which makes the arithmetic on private delivery straightforward above a handful of people. It is also better training here than in most subjects, because so much of Linux administration is specific to how your estate is actually built.

We deliver online or at your offices, six people for on site and four for virtual. Tell us what you run and we will say which course fits and whether it should be public or private.

Frequently asked questions