A self-contained, reproducible study environment for the Red Hat Certified System Administrator exam (EX200). Built and maintained by KNZLABS Curriculum Office, deployed via Terraform + Ansible from the KNZLABS Proxmox cluster, and designed to take a working IT professional from zero to exam-ready through real hands-on practice — not memorization.
Four live AlmaLinux 9 VMs, ten graded practical labs that mimic Red Hat's pass/fail scoring, a 250-question test bank, a 13-chapter reference course, and a built-in HTTP repo mirror for fully air-gapped runs. Everything runs locally; nothing leaves the rack.
Ten scenario-based labs, one per RHCSA v9 objective domain. Each ships with a task sheet and a bash grader that mimics Red Hat's scoring (must persist across reboot). Goal: 100% pass on each lab in under its stated time.
250 multiple-choice questions across all 10 domains (25 per domain). Four curated mock exams (40 questions × 35 min each), random mock, full bank, by-domain practice, and self-paced flash cards with click-to-flip review.
Browse the full RHCSA Foundations course online as 13 navigable chapters with sticky table of contents, prev/next navigation, and the shared portal menu. Rendered from a single markdown source for consistency with the labs and test engine.
Four AlmaLinux 9 VMs always reachable from ATLAS: rhcsa-node1 (workstation), rhcsa-node2 (server), rhcsa-repo (local package mirror), rhcsa-v10 (AlmaLinux 10 for v10 deltas). Reset to clean baseline via Proxmox snapshot between drills.
The rhcsa-repo node mirrors AlmaLinux 9 BaseOS + AppStream (13 GB, 1395 packages) over HTTP — practice the entire RHCSA toolkit with zero internet, exactly the way the exam environment behaves.
The entire lab is infrastructure-as-code. terraform apply from ~/rhcsa-lab/terraform/ on ATLAS provisions the VMs; ansible-playbook site.yml configures them. Tear down and rebuild in under 20 minutes.
| Pass | Goal | Time per lab |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Work through with the task sheet open, look things up freely. Build understanding. | 1.5× – 2× stated time |
| 2 | Work from the task sheet only. No external docs except man pages. | Stated time |
| 3 | Work from memory. Grader runs at the end. Exam pace. | Under stated time |
Run a mock exam from the test engine between passes 2 and 3 to gauge written recall. Hit 70%+ on three different mocks before scheduling the real exam.