My first week of study for my RHCSA and RHCE exams was less than stellar.

I did get a few things accomplished:

1) I reviewed all of the certification objectives for both tests and identified which ones were my strong areas and which I need to study more. I'm very comfortable with most RHCSA objectives. For the RHCE ones, I feel like a need a little bit of work on just a few.

2) I reviewed the first 3 chapters of the Michael Jang study guide. He has some very good practical notes about how to prepare for the exam.

3) I got very angry with Sony.

That is what the rest of this blog post is about. My Sony VAIO FW490, which I bought specifically for its hardware specs including expandability to 8GB RAM, has a completely nerfed BIOS. Sony has done this with several of their laptops. They disable processor virtualization support and issue a support statement that says "Intel VTX is not supported on this system"! Basically, the BIOS menus on my VAIO only allow edits to boot sequence, system time, and system password. That's it. So, I ask how is native capability of the hardware I purchased not supported?

Jang points out that you must have 64-bit compatible hardware to prepare all RHCSA and RHCE objectives. This is a requirement for using KVM in RHEL 6. So, if you don't have 64-bit compatible hardware, which I do, you can't install the x86_64 version of RHEL/CentOS/Scientific, which is the only version that supports KVM.

However, I learned something in addition to this. Unless processor virtualization support is enabled, KVM will not load the correct architecture-specific kernel module for your hardware. If that module is not loaded, then KVM will install and the KVM service will start. However, any commands or GUIs used to create, modify, or start individual virtual hosts will not be available. Thus, KVM is useless.

So, I'm upset with Sony because I spent a lot of money on one of the best PC notebooks available at the time I purchased it. I installed all BIOS updates and I still couldn't access the hardware capabilities I paid for. So, I had to go to craiglist to quickly find a suitable notebook to use for my lab practice. I ended up spending $200 for a Dell Latitude D630 with 2.0GHz Centrino Duo and 1GB RAM. I had some leftover SODIMMS to upgrade RAM to 4GB. So, I'm back in business and I can do labs.

This week, I'm taking the official RedHat RHCSA Rapid Track Course (RH200). My RHCSA exam (EX200) is on Friday. I'll update next week after the class and exam.