So hello. Welcome everyone to today's webinar, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 New Features and Benefits Overview. We are thrilled you decided to sign in today for this unique opportunity to learn from a content expert. And for a more in-depth learning experience, I'm excited to announce that you can save 20% when you enroll in an upcoming Red Hat 354 course with ExitCertified. More information on this will be shared at the end of our webinar.
During this webinar everyone's microphones will be muted. So if you have any questions, please enter them into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. There's also a chat window here, whichever one suits your preference. All questions will be answered during the dedicated Q&A portion of the webinar following the presentation. The webinar is being recorded and we will send a copy of the recording to everyone in this room today.
Today's webinar is presented by John Walter, a Solutions Architect for the Red Hat Training and Certification Team specializing in cloud and DevOps technologies. John is a Red Hat certified professional with a deep knowledge of RHEL and its layered products. I'm thrilled to announce and present to you, John Walter.
Thanks Michelle, and thank you everybody for joining today's webinar. So yeah, like Michelle says, my name is John Walter. I've been with Red Hat for about four years now, and in this role on the training and certification team for about the last full year.
Part of my job day to day is enabling customers about some of the changes to our curriculum or about different ways to train on the various Red Hat products. And today we're going to be talking about RHEL 8. If you're living under a rock, you probably don't know that we just announced or just released this new product a few weeks ago at Red Hat Summit, and then some of the changes that are reflected in our curriculum and some of the ways to up skills if you're already familiar and experienced working with RHEL.
But first, let's talk about some of the new features in RHEL 8. Some of the kind of the high-level features here boil down to three bullet points, so subscription expansion, predictable schedule, and then we'll cover kind of the new features on a technical perspective as well. But for those of you that aren't familiar, for a long time we've had a product called Red Hat Insights which was sort of like a predictive analytics tool. We worked with our product security teams, we worked with our support organization to really identify common security threats or weak configurations, things like that, really taking information from all of our customers and feeding it into this big database. And Insights would really proactively let you know, hey, you're leaving these ports open or this [inaudible 00:03:30] package needs to be updated.
So for a long time that was a product that you actually had to purchase from us. Now it's something as part of RHEL 8 is actually just included with the platform. So something we're really, really excited about. We're hoping obviously security is a huge focus here at Red Hat. So this is something that we're really, really excited about getting to our customers hands.
Predictable schedule, for those of you that have been working with RHEL for quite a long time, you know that we don't really have a predictive schedule, at least we haven't historically. RHEL 7 came out just over five years ago, and before that, RHEL 6 was like six or seven years before that.
Right now we're committing to a three year major release cycle and a six month minor release cycle. For those of you that aren't familiar with really how our software lifecycle works, obviously RHEL is based on the upstream Fedora community, and they release very, very often. It's bleeding-edge, a lot of new features. And we work with that community. A lot of our engineering staff is a part of that community as well, to identify what the best new features are and really harden them and make them enterprise ready.
We're committing to doing that on a solid cycle so that you and your organizations can really plan your maintenance Windows, more predictable schedule. We're not going to try and drop a whole bunch of updates on you right before Black Friday or anything like that. That's definitely something that we're really excited about. And then, from a technology perspective, we made a lot of big enhancements in RHEL 8. So we'll talk about those now.
So really just from a high level, at a glance, some of the big key features here. The kernel we're shipping is now 4.18 which is a pretty substantial upgrade from what we were shipping in RHEL 7. Some other kind of high-level things, you'll see hardware architectures. We're no longer supporting IBM Power big-endian, little-endian only, but we're definitely making a big push on the ARM side. So for those of you who are using ARM boards, lightweight processor, stuff like that, major support for those hardware architectures.
We're still staying with XFS as our default cloud system. That's been really, really popular as of RHEL 7 and has continued to gain traction in the upstream community for the last four or so years. So definitely sticking with that. Same with Chronyd as our time sync, and there's definitely some ways that you can integrate your existing NTP workflows with Chronyd as well.
NetworkManager is here to stay too. One other thing I'll point out as far as package management comes, we're now shipping an updated version of Yum that's completely based on DNF. So for those of you that already think Fedora and have maybe scripts within your environment focused around Yum, we've made this really, really backwards compatible. So for anyone that has kind of been switching between RHEL 7 and Fedora I'd say like 28, you'll notice some pretty big difference as far as some of the options within DNF and Yum. We've actually made it so that those are backwards compatible. So if you have existing scripts that utilize Yum in your environment, you shouldn't see any difference or any unexpected issues in that regard. So I'm really excited as far as that goes.
We talked a little bit about Insights. We talked about our release cadence. Some of the big technical features that we're going to dive a little bit deeper into, container tools. We're really all in as far as containers go here at Red Hat. Obviously some of you are probably familiar with OpenShift which are container platform. But we've been utilizing things like Docker and Kubernetes and Buildah, things like that for years now, and we've added now support so you no longer need root level privileges to actually build and deploy those containers. So this is a really, really, really big change, is pretty transformative as far as container tools go running straight from the kernel.
Beyond that, we've kind of streamlined our repositories as well. So we're no longer going to have our software collections library be separate from our standard repositories. You can certainly deploy the more bleeding-edge versions of certain services, have them in tandem or in conjunction with the existing services that we ship.
And then the internal session recording, that's something that we've actually gotten a lot of feedback from our customers on over the last few years. Full disclosure, I came from the support organization before coming into this role. So I worked with customers day-to-day who were really looking to audit and understand where it should happen, especially when it wasn't a service family, but it was maybe somebody going in and accessing something they shouldn't, or editing a file that they should ignore or something like that.
We now have the ability to actually record sessions. And you can either view that video through Cockpit which we'll jump into in just a second or just have that push to some audit log, something like that. So that's something that we're really excited about, something that has been asked about for quite a while. You asked and we delivered.
Let's jump in to some of the more specific technical features of RHEL 8. Creating images for all your environments with image builder. A lot of our customers aren't using the stock RHEL 8 image. They need to create users and they need to create specific services with specific configurations and deploy those, and they don't really have the time to spin up the stock RHEL image and then deploy all those services and do all that configuration management after the fact. So we've made it really, really easy to create and manage the images from the command line and then deploy those into your environment.
The image builder is going to use paradigms that are familiar to users. You'll start with a list of packages. You'll create a configuration. And then you'll create that image. And from a single blueprint, any of the supported targets can really be selected and created which will really ensure consistency with the build images for pretty much every the environment that's used today. And we're supporting more and more as they kind of arrive. You can also create live ISOs and applying style images as well.
You see in this diagram here, you have one blueprint it's used for the image that can be used in really any supported image target. So that's bare metal, if it's a virtual machine or deploying to a public or private cloud. So really, really excited about this. This is something that a lot of our customers are sort of having to hack their way in and not really having support from the Red Hat perspective in that sense. So this is definitely something that those that are especially deploying in a DevOps environment are really going to be excited about to utilize.
The next feature, I touched on this a little bit earlier, but deploying containerized services is growing exponentially. And some people are using something like OpenShift or a different container platform out there to manage and deploy those images in those containers. But some people need something that's really lightweight. They need to be able to do it from the kernel. So we've deployed these to container tools. It's really kind of an ideal environment for understanding the impact and exploring those different new tools.
This is a nice kind of bridge to our OpenShift container platform. Especially if you have sort of a smaller environment. You don't necessarily need the enterprise scale that OpenShift provides you if you just need to run a few containers in your environment. We have tools here to find images that are already existing out there. You can build them yourselves and then you can run them straight from the command line. And as I mentioned before, it's not something that any longer requires you to have root access. So if you're an unprivileged user, you can definitely still take advantage of these different container tools that we're shipping.
And these are tools that have been around for a long time. Podman, Buildah, Skopeo, especially Podman and Buildah are things that we have shipped and supported on RHEL, but especially in RHEL 7 is a big focus of ours. But having that access and ability to run that as an unprivileged user and having more support in that in that sense is going to be really, really huge for you and your company.
And then we're also shipping roles now. These are ways to really consistently configure systems. You can kind of handle changes to existing environments when you change providers. And really it can reduce the work that an admin needs when utilizing something like Ansible to write playbooks. You'll see here, we have roles here on the left side. The ones that are in red are ones that Red Hat actually is providing. So these are system roles. Some may be for a networking user. Some may be for someone who's managing SELinux. And then the other two, webserver, dbserver, those are actually customized roles. So you can create your own role based on a specific use case or a specific job role.
But automation is really a cool component of DevOps or Infrastructure as Code, but it's also a major focus of Red Hat. We're utilizing something like Ansible in small or large scale environments. Really as part of an automated workflow RHEL is providing kind of these native hooks to assist with configuration and management of the platform. We're providing these roles to really provide a layer of abstraction at the automation level and then provide a kind of common syntax across major releases. This is something that will work with RHEL 8 and in future versions as well and kind of backwards-compatible with RHEL 7 too.
This is definitely something that will be kind of the norm going forward with every minor and major release of RHEL. But for those of you that aren't working with Ansible day in, day out, roles may be something that from a theoretical level you understand but maybe not from a technical level. We'll talk a little bit later on as to how to really get into all these new features and get a lot of exposure with that.
So the training and certifying on RHEL 8. We've talked about some of the new features. So next we'll talk about what are the benefits of training with Red Hat to get up to speed on these new features or becoming certified. We provide, for those of you that aren't familiar, we provide a fully practical environment for you to work in. If you haven't taken a Red Hat class before, the way that they're structured, essentially you're introduced to a topic and immediately there's some kind of learning validation. And usually that's some kind of guided exercise or lab, where you're in a lab environment that we provide actually practicing what we've just taught you. You're not sitting there listening to a lecture for 20 hours, anything like that. A lot of the time, I would say well over 50% of the time you're actually in the lab environment working on these different concepts.
Let's dive into some of the changes that we've actually made with our curriculum. First and foremost, maybe I should lay the groundwork a little bit as far as what our kind of baseline certifications look like. We have three levels of system administration courses, Sys Admin I, Sys Admin II, Sys Admin III. Historically Sys Admin I and Sys Admin II have kind of been taught together, and they really lay the groundwork to someone who is very unfamiliar with working with RHEL or maybe just Linux in general. That leads to our Red Hat Certified System Administrator Certification.
That is largely going unchanged. There are a few new features that we're going to speak to in that new course, but that course, RH124 or RH134, they're alive today, they are already available and available in both RHEL 7 and in RHEL 8. And will stay available in RHEL 7 for the next year. So this time May 2020 those courses in RHEL 7 will no longer be available.
On the RHCE side which is the Sys Admin III course, that's our Red Hat Certified Engineer, we've actually made some pretty significant changes. For those of you that worked with RHEL 7 or are interested in getting certified in RHEL 7, you still will be able to until that May 2020 deadline when those courses and that exam will go away. What we have made the changes to and sort of the reasoning behind it, we now have a huge focus on automation of various system administration tasks using things like Ansible which we talked about a little bit before.
And there is still some emphasis on shell scripting, but the way the old cap class is really structured, you get the groundwork of system administration tasks in Sys Admin I, Sys Admin II. Sys Admin III really dives into network management and kind of advanced service management. You're doing things like deploying in Apache web server, actually really deploying like three different web servers. One of them will be insecure, one of them will be secure, one of them is using various plugins. You'll manage a [inaudible 00:17:47] AV database.
Those are things that over the last few years as all of these automation platforms have really become prevalent throughout the industry, we've realized our customers really automating those tasks. There's no reason for them to manually spin up a web server and propagate the different content in that server when they could use something like Ansible to automate all that.
So what we've done is actually moved a lot of our existing Ansible content into the RHEL 8 RHCE course, so that our students are going to be exposed to the same concepts, but from an automation perspective. And you'll still get some experience with bash scripting, but the emphasis here is to really focus on automation because that is going to be really kind of the gold standard moving forward in the industry.
So RH254, that's the previous Red Hat Certified Engineering course, will still be available for the next year. But at the same time, we will be releasing in just a few days, I think next week, the RH294 which will be the Sys Admin III Linux automation course.
So that's what is changing. What's not changing? Nobody's existing certification status is affected by these changes. So if you already have your RHCSA and it's on RHEL 7, you are still an RHCSA. If you have your RHCE on RHEL 7, you're still an RHCE. You still must have your RHCSA in order to earn your RHCE. So you still need to go through Sys Admin I, Sys Admin II past exams before you can take Sys Admin III and take that exam.
The exam will still be 100% hands-on. Just like the course, our exams are 100% practical. You're set at a system and required to configure it in X amount of ways. That is not changing as well. Really it's just the content that's changing. The RHEL 7 dates RHCE exam and RHEL 7 RHCE ... oh sorry, Sys Admin III course, they will still remain available for the next year. So if you're already in the process of making that journey toward your RHCE and you started working on RHEL 7, feel free to continue to. I kind of have that diagrammed out in this next slide here.
The various learning paths as they are right now. The one of the left is around RHEL 7. Traditionally you would go through the RHCSA by taking the Sys Admin I, Sys Admin II course and then taking that exam, followed by Sys Admin III and then taking the RHCE exam.
On the right you'll see the only thing that's really changing is that we've replaced the Sys Admin III course in the RHCE exam. Having said that, if you are certified in RHEL 7 and you're interested in taking the RHEL 8 RHCE, by all means, please do. At a fundamental system administration level, the way that you create a user, the way that you manage permissions, none of that's changing. It's really just the focus of automating specific tasks versus manually writing those tasks yourself. That is the key that's really changing here.
And if you feel that your organization is not going to be adopting RHEL 7 or RHEL 8 anytime soon, then we encourage you to stay with the RHEL 7 content. If you want to get a jump on RHEL 8, then by all means, please switch lanes. We really encourage you to assess where you feel most comfortable, which version you'd rather stay with, and know that you'll have the support from us for the next year to really certify in either version.
Once you achieve that certification, no matter which version it is, it's good for three years. For me, I'm certified RHCE on RHEL 7. And every subsequent exam that I pass will kind of re-up that certification. For me, I don't feel the need to necessarily recertify on RHEL 8. Part of that we'll get into in just a second as far as how to keep up skills if you already have your RHCE.
Diving in a little bit deeper into the System Administration III course. It's really designed for experienced system administrators. If you're new to Linux or if you ... A lot of our customers on the engineering side will be 20 year Windows admins or they've worked with other flavors of Linux or maybe they're UNIX guys or HP-UX guys. Whatever it is, this course really expects you to have all the system administration fundamentals. So if you haven't taken the RHCSA essay exam, I'd highly encourage you to take a look on our website to see what those exam objectives are. Make sure that you can speak to this before jumping into the content of this course because we don't want you to sign up at a level that you're not ready for.
Beyond that, like I said before, the focus of this course is to take a look at more advanced system and networking use cases. You'll be expected to configure bridges or with network manager, sending up specific services, modifying permissions and creating users and modifying the access that they have to specific services or specific directories. Those are the things that are still going to be covered in this, but the way that you do it is going to be a little bit different.
Ansible is probably the hottest thing that we have going on right now from a pride perspective. So you'll see that not just on the platform side, but in all of our other products. Ansible is becoming more and more prevalent. Deploying systems, managing their configuration, orchestration, security compliance, those are all things that people are using Ansible for. So we wanted to make sure that people on the system administration side are getting exposure to those kind of concepts and they're able to use them in their day-to-day tasks.
Now, we still have plenty of Ansible content as well. We're actually in the process of developing a few different Ansible courses around Advanced Ansible best practices, Windows automation. We already have a course around network automation. So if you're a networking engineer, understanding how to manage all of those networking devices that you have in your environment, those are things that after taking this course, the RH294, you'd be able to jump into those more advanced Ansible concepts as well, because you'll have that groundwork laid out for you.
You can also jump into our more advanced RHEL courses. If you're interested in performance tuning or troubleshooting diagnostics, if you're interested in deploying SAP HANA in a clustered environment, something like that, we have all these courses that you can take after the Sys Admin II or really Sys Admin III as well. But this is going to be a great precursor if you're interested in more advanced Ansible concepts, as well as more advanced RHEL concepts.
Frequently asked questions. Why are we making these changes? And I touched on this a little bit before, but as our customers are scaling their environments more and more, they're expected to provide so many more services, their understanding that relying on teams to do this manually is just not an option. So they're having to look towards different automation platforms, things like Puppet or Chef or Ansible are really solving these kind of issues that our customers are running into.
One of the big benefits in Ansible is that it doesn't really require any kind of coding knowledge whatsoever. So for those that aren't familiar with Ansible, Ansible utilizes YAML to create playbooks. So playbooks are really just a series of tasks or scripts. They're written in YAML, they're human readable, they're something that really anyone within your organization will be able to take a look at a playbook and kind of understand exactly what it's doing.
The playbook utilizes tasks and tasks are just modules. So you'll have one for Yum, you'll have one to copy, you'll have one to create a user. We have something like 12,000 or 13,000 different modules that we ship. And they don't just interact with the platform but they can modify your cloud. So if you have something like OpenStack or VMware, if you have AWS or Microsoft Azure, we have modules that will be able to speak any of those different kind of use cases. So those are things that will be really laid out in the Linux automation course.
But the different kind of use cases are really extraordinary. Certain customers have 20,000 different networking devices in their ecosystem from Cisco IOS to BIOS to Arista or Juniper devices. There are modules that will allow you to interact with each and every one of those. So you can run a series of Playbooks to not just provision them but also to manage their configurations throughout their lifecycle.
Same thing on the OS side. You can interact with Windows systems or various Linux distributions, Unix, you name it. And the nice thing is all these modules are written in Python. You won't get to get experienced to actually writing those modules, but you've got Python developers or if you are a Python developer and you can't find a module that fits for your specific use case, you can write one. They're actually rather simple.
And then the nice thing is, just like with Red Hat and our relationship with the Fedora community or I should say RHEL and our relationship with the Fedora community, our Ansible that we ship is enterprise ready. We also have that same relationship with the upstream community for Ansible as well. They're one of the more helpful or most helpful communities I should say out there. And if you have a specific use case and there's not a module that really works towards that, you can work with that community to develop one. There are thousands of different upstream modules out there that you can get access to and provision and manage different devices throughout your environment.
If you're already an RHCE, what happens to you? I mentioned this before. Nothing. You'll continue to maintain your status as an RHCE until that certification expires. There's a few different options that you have in that regard. The first thing that you can do is recertify under the new program if you want to. Do you want to be certified RHCE under RHEL 8? Then by all means, you can take that exam. We would definitely encourage you to take the course first, unless you have a lot Ansible experience because it's not just a incremental update in that course.
Other things that you can do, you can take another exam. Any exams that you take that fall under our RHCE umbrella will re-up any of your existing certifications that you have. For instance, I became certified RHCE back in 2015, but my certification won't expire until 2022 because I've had subsequent exams that have re-upped that certification expiration date.
You've got a few options if you're not already certified as an RHCE, then I would encourage you to take a look at the new course that we have, but like I said before, if you're using RHEL 7 exclusively in your environment, that we still have that course available to you.
I have my RHCSA but not my RHCE. What should I do? I talked on this kind of on the last slide, but really that's up to you. We'll support you going down either one of those paths. But if automation is certainly an interesting topic to you, then I would definitely encourage you to take a look at the new system administration course and maybe pursue that towards your RHCE. That, like I said, will be available on June 3rd. And excuse me. I got a couple guys in the room with me just to confirm that. I think it's June 3rd. They're shaking their heads yes. That's next week. So if you're interested, you can take a look at the various delivery ways that we have and speak to somebody that's certified about one of our public classrooms or our HLS which are Linux subscription which gives you access to all of our courses.
We talked a lot about the RHCE, about some of the RHEL 8 changes. What if you're already in RHCE, if you're already an experienced Linux user and you just want to know what those differences are? Well, we actually have developed a course around that, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 New Features for Experienced Administration course. That is a mouthful. I'll talk to the marketing people about that. The RH354 is a course that we've developed really as a delta course. Obviously, like the name says, this is for experienced administrators. So we want to make sure that the audience goes in with the prerequisite skills. But this course is really one of the first of its kind as far as Red Hat is concerned. We don't have a lot of those gap courses in our portfolio, so this is definitely something that's going to be really, really exciting to those of you that are experienced RHEL users.
We talked a little bit about some of the features already, but some of the key features I'll point out here. This course will cover the migration path. So if you have RHEL 7 in your environment already and you want to understand what that upgrade assistant looks like, the very first chapter gets you at spinning up a RHEL 8 VM and then actually upgrading a RHEL 7 VM to a RHEL 8 VM. And again, we provide all that stuff for you.
Covering the migration path is really kind of a key issue. We've made really, really big changes to our upgrade assistant to allow for roll backs in the case of an issue and to really assess if it's going to be a risky upgrade or if it's going to be just fine. Other things, administering and managing systems with Cockpit. We've had Cockpit as a feature of a web UI available since RHEL 6. But we've made some really, really significant updates to it, specifically on the Virt-manager side, we're really starting to phase out Virt-manager. So for those of you that have been spitting out VMs from the kernel using verb manager, that will still be available for the first couple minor releases of RHEL 8, but we're starting to phase that out in favor of Cockpit managing those virtual machines from Cockpit.
We'll cover things like building images with the composer and learning about the system roles that we discussed earlier. You'll get some exposure to Wayland, Chronyd, managing different versions of Python, so we're shipping a new version of Python. So if you've got applications of older versions of Python, there's a whole chapter on really how to kind of reconcile multiple versions of Python in your environment. Beyond that, deploying and managing containers with a new run times that we ship. Containers and Ansible are pretty much the two most common words that you hear around Red Hat. So big, big focus on containerization within this course.
Network Manager. We made some pretty big significant feature enhancements with Network Manager as well. For those of you that didn't go through the RHCSA or RHCE courses as part of REHL 7, you may not know that Network Manager has kind of become our de-facto network management tool. You're no longer expected to jump into interface config files and update those manually. You can do that all from the command line or there's a nice [inaudible 00:34:17] available too you as well. We made some pretty significant changes there.
Other than that, I highly recommend this course if you are really just interested in the various features. This course is already available if you are interested in what some of these features look like. We have this available in our learners description already, and we are actually now just pushing the updated bits into this course now. So really, really exciting. It's something that I hope we have more of with some of the newer products that we have coming out in the future. But this is something that for me to up skill personally, I put this in the most extremely valuable. So I highly encourage you to go through that.
And as far as various RHEL content, we've covered the changes to the RHCE, we have already pushed out the Sys Admin I and Sys Admin II courses, and Sys Admin III will be available next week. And then this gap course. These are really four courses to kind of get you up to speed on RHEL 8, become certified. I will mention that this gap course does not have a certification. So if certification is something that you're interested in, we would direct you towards maybe the RH199 which is our fast-track course. It combines the content of Sys Admin I and Sys Admin II into one week or RH294 if you're interested in achieving obtaining your RHCE.
So with that, I've talked for a little while. Let's get to the Q&A.
To all of our attendees, if you do have any questions, now's a great time to post them in either the Q&A or in the chat box. As a reminder, your microphones are disabled, so you will need to use either of those features if you do have any questions.
And while we're waiting for those coming, I see Michelle already dropped in the chat. But I'll throw some more info up here as well. We do have an exclusive offer for y'all as far as discount codes towards RH394 or 364, I'm sorry. I'm going to take a look at that. I think Michelle just posted it again, but I'll throw the slide up here as well for some more information.
So we do have one question in the chat John. Do you see it there or would you like me to read it?
Oh, I see it right here. If I want to pursue the RHCSA, do I still have an option to choose RHEL 7 or RHEL 8?
Great question. You do still have that option. You'll have that option until May 2020. We'll allow or we'll keep that content up for the next year. We really want to make sure that our customers that are already on that path or beginning that path, pursuing their RHCSA or their RHCE, they still have those options. Yeah, definitely, depending on how it is that you go about pursuing your RHCSA, if it's something like the learn a subscription if you want to do it self-paced, you can actually just change the version within the course. So you'll have all versions available to you.
Make sure that if you do enroll in a public classroom or a private delivery, that they should specify the version that they're going to be teaching. You just want to make sure that you don't walk in on the first day of class and they're teaching RHEL 8 when you want RHEL 7. But you definitely have that option of choice. So great question.
A couple more questions in here. I got my RHCE in February 2016. My understanding is that it is expired and I would have to take the RHCSA again. It's a great question. I would take a look. You can go to our certification portal to verify your certification status. I would make sure unless you got subsequent certification, then your RHCE probably would have expired back in February 2019. If that is the case, then you would need to re-certify with RHCSA and RHCE.
And Jeff asked if we can get a copy of the presentation. I'm sure that Michelle can provide a copy, and I'll send that over to her afterwards and she can probably give it to all the attendees.
Sure. We definitely can. And as a reminder, we will send a recording of the presentation everyone, but we'll try and get that slide deck included as well.
Michelle, you may be able to answer this other question around the discount as well and maybe clarify that.
Yeah. So right now this promo is only for RH354. But don't hesitate to reach out to one of our sales reps and they might be able to help you out.
Any other questions? It can be about anything Red Hat.
All right. Well, thank you John. We're at the end of our presentation. And thank you all for attending. As another-
It looks like we got one question. Sorry Michelle.
Oh nice. Go ahead. Let's take it.
Yeah. So I currently have none of the certifications. I'd like to know if I should bypass the RHEL 7 path totally and just go to RHEL 8? That's a really good question. That's kind of a common question that we're getting right now. It is really up to you. I would say certify in the version that you plan on using. If you on a personal level or if your organization is planning out making that transition to RHEL 8 within the next year, then I would say it's probably a good idea to certify in RHEL 8. Obviously I know that having worked with customers for a long time that some are more bleeding-edge than others. Some of our customers are still running RHEL 5 or RHEL 4 in their production environment.
I would say that having the ability to choose which version kind of gives you that flexibility. And like I said, if you get certified on RHEL 7 and the RHCSA and then you decide you want to jump to the RHCE and certify in RHEL 8, that's totally fine. There's not going to be an issue there.
Is there a RHEL 8 channels available for satellite? So satellite we just released 6.5 for satellite. 6.6 will be the first version that fully supports RHEL 8. So look out for that. That should be in the next couple months.
And are course objectives changed in RHEL 8 for the RHCSA and RHCE? That's a really good question. The RHCSA is largely unchanged. There are a few new features in RHEL 8 that will be covered in the RHCSA, but largely because it's just teaching the core fundamentals of system administration, the RHCSA is largely unchanged. The RHCE, since it's such a focus on automation, the objectives have changed pretty significantly. I would just encourage you to take a look at the course objectives and the exam objectives on the exam page, just to get an idea going in, especially if you're experienced RHCSA already or of that kind of equivalent experience, just take a look and see what those objectives are, but great question.
I think that's about it.
Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you all. We will send out a recording of today's presentation. And just as another reminder, I'll post that promo code for RH354 in the chat. Right now this is the only promo code we have going, but stay tuned. There's new updates released all the time. Thank you all so much. I hope you enjoy your day.
Thanks everyone.