LinuC Level 3 304Virtualization & High Availability

Exam 304 Objectives

Each item of the objectives is weighted for its importance. The weight is approximately in the range 1 to 10, and indicates the relative importance of the topic covered. Questions on topics with higher weight appear more often in the exams.

Topic 330: Virtualization

330.1 Virtualization concepts and theory
Weight	8
Description	Candidates should know and understand the general concepts, theory and terminology of virtualization.
Scope of Key Knowledge	Specialized terminology Pros and cons of virtualization Various Virtual Machine Monitors (VMM) Migration of physical to virtual machines Migration of virtual machines between host systems Cloud computing
Important files, terms, and utilities:	Hypervisor Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM) Paravirtualization (PV) Container virtualization Emulation and simulation CPU flags /proc/cpuinfo Migration (P2V, V2V) IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

330.2 Xen
Weight	9
Description	Candidates should be able to install, configure, maintain, and troubleshoot Xen installations. Support of Xen version 4.x.
Scope of Key Knowledge	Xen architecture, networking and storage Xen configuration Xen utilities Troubleshooting Xen installations Basic knowledge of XAPI Awareness of XenStore Awareness of Xen Boot Parameters Awareness of the xm utility
Important files, terms, and utilities:	Domain0 (Dom0), DomainU (DomU) PV-DomU, HVM-DomU /etc/xen/ xl xl.cfg xl.conf xe xentop

330.3 KVM
Weight	9
Description	Candidates should be able to install, configure, maintain, migrate, and troubleshoot KVM.
Scope of Key Knowledge	KVM architecture, networking, and storage KVM configuration KVM utilities Troubleshooting KVM installations
Important files, terms, and utilities:	Kernel modules: kvm, kvm-intel and kvm-amd /etc/kvm/ /dev/kvm kvm KVM monitor qemu qemu-img

330.4 Other virtualization solutions
Weight	3
Description	Candidates should have some basic knowledge and experience of virtualization technology other than Xen and KVM.
Scope of Key Knowledge	Basic knowledge of OpenVZ and LXC Awareness of other virtualization technologies Basic technical knowledge of virtualization technologies
Important files, terms, and utilities:	OpenVZ VirtualBox LXC docker packer vagrant

330.5 Libvirt and related tools
Weight	5
Description	Candidates should have basic knowledge and experience with the libvirt library and common tools.
Scope of Key Knowledge	libvirt architecture, networking, and storage Basic technical knowledge of libvirt and virsh Awareness of oVirt
Important files, terms, and utilities:	libvirtd /etc/libvirt/ virsh oVirt

330.6 Cloud management tools
Weight	2
Description	Candidates should have basic feature knowledge of common cloud management tools.
Scope of Key Knowledge	Knowledge of basic features of OpenStack and CloudStack Awareness of Eucalyptus and OpenNebula
Important files, terms, and utilities:	OpenStack CloudStack Eucalyptus OpenNebula

Topic 334: High Availability Cluster Management

334.1 High availability concepts and theory
Weight	5
Description	Candidates should understand the properties and design approaches of high-availability clusters.
Scope of Key Knowledge	Understand the most important cluster architectures Understand recovery and cluster reorganization mechanisms Design an appropriate cluster architecture for a given purpose Application aspects of high availability Operational considerations of high availability
Important files, terms, and utilities:	Active/Passive Cluster, Active/Active Cluster Failover Cluster, Load-balanced Cluster Shared-nothing Cluster, Shared-disk Cluster Cluster resources Cluster services Quorum Fencing Split brain Redundancy Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) Service Level Agreement (SLA) Disaster recovery Replication Session handling

334.2 Load balanced clusters
Weight	6
Description	Candidates should know how to install, configure, maintain, and troubleshoot LVS. This includes the configuration and use of keepalived and ldirectord. Candidates should further be able to install, configure, maintain and troubleshoot HAProxy.
Scope of Key Knowledge	Understanding of LVS/IPVS Basic knowledge of VRRP Configuration of keepalived Configuration of ldirectord Backend server network configuration Understanding of HAProxy Configuration of HAProxy
Important files, terms, and utilities:	ipvsadm syncd LVS forwarding (NAT, Direct Routing, Tunneling, Local Node) connection scheduling algorithms keepalived configuration file ldirectord configuration file genhash HAProxy configuration file Load-balancing algorithms ACL

334.3 Failover clusters
Weight	6
Description	Candidates should have experience in the installation, configuration, maintenance, and troubleshooting of a Pacemaker cluster. This includes the use of Corosync. The focus is on Pacemaker 1.1 for Corosync 2.x.
Scope of Key Knowledge	Pacemaker architecture and components (CIB, CRMd, PEngine, LRMd, DC, STONITHd) Pacemaker cluster configuration Resource classes (OCF, LSB, Systemd, Upstart, Service, STONITH, Nagios) Resource rules and constraints (location, order, colocation) Advanced resource features (templates, groups, clone resources, multi-state resources) Pacemaker management using pcs Pacemaker management using crmsh Configuration and management of corosync used in conjunction with Pacemaker Awareness of other cluster engines (OpenAIS, Heartbeat, CMAN)
Important files, terms, and utilities:	pcs crm crm_mon crm_verify crm_simulate crm_shadow crm_resource crm_attribute crm_node crm_standby cibadmin corosync.conf authkey corosync-cfgtool corosync-cmapctl corosync-quorumtool stonith_admin

334.4 High availability in enterprise Linux distributions
Weight	1
Description	Candidates should be aware of how enterprise Linux distributions integrate high-availability technologies.
Scope of Key Knowledge	Basic knowledge of RHEL high availability add-On Knowledge of SUSE Linux enterprise high availability extension
Important files, terms, and utilities:	Distribution specific configuration tools Integration of cluster engines, load-balancers, storage technology, cluster filesystems, etc.

Topic 335: High Availability Cluster Storage

335.1 DRBD / cLVM
Weight	3
Description	Candidates are expected to have the experience and knowledge to install, configure, maintain and troubleshoot DRBD devices. This includes integration with Pacemaker. DRBD configuration of version 8.4.x is covered. Candidates should be able to manage LVM configuration within a shared storage cluster.
Scope of Key Knowledge	Understanding of DRBD resources, states and replication modes Understanding of DRBD resources, networking, disks, and devices Understanding of DRBD automatic recovery and error handling Management of DRBD using drbdadm Basic knowledge of drbdsetup and drbdmeta Integration of DRBD with Pacemaker cLVM Integration of cLVM with Pacemaker
Important files, terms, and utilities:	Protocol A, B, and C Primary, secondary Three node replication drbd kernel module drbdadm drbdsetup drbdmeta /etc/drbd.conf /proc/drbd LVM2 clvmd vgchange, vgs

335.2 Clustered file systems
Weight	3
Description	Candidates should know how to install, maintain and troubleshoot installations using GFS2 and OCFS2. This includes integration with Pacemaker as well as awareness of other clustered filesystems available in Linux environments.
Scope of Key Knowledge	Understand major cluster file systems Create, maintain, and troubleshoot GFS2 file systems in a cluster Create, maintain, and troubleshoot OCFS2 file systems in a cluster Integration of GFS2 and OCFS2 with Pacemaker Awareness of the O2CB cluster stack Awareness of other commonly used clustered file systems
Important files, terms, and utilities:	Distributed Lock Manager (DLM) mkfs.gfs2 mount.gfs2 fsck.gfs2 gfs2_grow gfs2_edit gfs2_jadd mkfs.ocfs2 mount.ocfs2 fsck.ocfs2 tunefs.ocfs2 mounted.ocfs2 o2info o2image CephFS GlusterFS AFS