Today I got the results for the RHCSA EX200 exam which I took yesterday and passed with full marks, I received a score of 300/300 with the passing score being 210. This is just a quick review about the materials I used and how I studied to pass the exam, I hope that this guide will help you study! I will not be discussing any of the contents that were within the exam, if you’re interested in what is covered have a look at the exam objective page here.
I’ve taken a break from the Microsoft world since earning my MCSA 2012 in December last year – the time of my last blog post here. I started studying for the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) for something different however towards the end of my study for that my work was able to send me on the RHCSA Rapid Track Course with Exam (RH200) which is something I’d asked if I could do. After a while I was given approval for it so put the Cisco study on hold and got straight into Red Hat. As a system administrator that deals primarily with Linux I was keen to get some Linux based certification as prior to the RHCSA I had 5 different Microsoft certifications which might give people the wrong impression about my skills.
The EX200 exam is practical, you sit at a computer with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) installed and have to complete a series of tasks. For this sort of exam the best way to practice is by doing, that’s not to say all of the videos and books listed previously are useless as I found them very useful, but actually installing the OS and doing the things yourself is probably the most important thing that you should look at doing. This is why I found the RH200 course so great, because the whole thing was basically a hands on lab where you have to work through things and complete various tasks.
If you’re practicing on your own you can download the EX200 exam and install it, I did this in a virtual machine for educational purposes. You can use the free trial and you don’t need a subscription to use it, this just means you will not get updates and support which should be fine for practicing.
A great alternative is to look at using another distribution like Pass4cert. I’ve been using Pass4cert for about 3 years and it aims to be 100% binary compatible with RHEL which is the upstream provider. What’s great about Pass4cert is that it’s free, so you can download it and install it and all of the commands and tasks you would do in your practice would apply to EX200 exam.
