Specialization 3 of 4 · Linux Enterprise Track

Performance and Availability

Measure and tune systems, and keep services running through failures.

Is it for you? You like finding bottlenecks and designing for the day something fails.

2 examsCounts toward RHCA

EX436

Red Hat Certified Specialist in High Availability Clustering

Lessons planned

Exam length: 3 hours
Based on: The RHEL High Availability Add-on, latest version
Recommended first: RHCSA or RHCE recommended; the RH436 course
Format: Hands-on tasks on live systems

What the exam covers

Build a cluster: install, configure and set quorum
Fencing agents, and testing that any node can fence any other
Logging, monitoring, alerts and notification emails
Highly available services, resource groups and floating IP addresses
Failover behaviour and where services may run
Shared storage: iSCSI, multipath, shared and highly available LVM
GFS2 file systems: create, share, grow and add journals

Official EX436 exam page

EX442

Red Hat Certified Specialist in Performance Tuning

Lessons planned

Exam length: 4 hours
Based on: RHEL 10
Recommended first: RHCSA (RHCE is better); the RH442 course
Format: Hands-on tasks on live systems

What the exam covers

Analyse behaviour with vmstat, iostat, sar, Performance Co-Pilot and sos
Kernel run-time parameters with sysctl, /proc/sys and module options
Application analysis with ps, top, Valgrind, SystemTap and eBPF tools
Process priorities, tuned profiles, control groups and systemd limits
Memory: huge pages, overcommit, swap behaviour, NUMA and shared memory
Disk and file systems: I/O scheduler, layout and dirty page writeback
Network performance: buffer sizes from bandwidth and round-trip time

Official EX442 exam page

Planning your three. Combine with Automation and Deployment to run tuned clusters at scale.

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