Upskill on RHEL 9

Last month, Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL 9), boasting a more flexible and stable foundation to support hybrid cloud innovation and a faster, more consistent experience for deploying applications and critical workloads across physical, virtual, private and public cloud and edge deployments. Red Hat Training and Certification has always iterated their offerings in tandem with Red Hat product releases, and the launch of RHEL 9 is no exception. Courses and exams have been updated to reflect changes in the Red Hat product portfolio, so that learners are able to access training relevant to the version of Red Hat software that is used in their own working environment.

So, what does this mean for current learners and certificants? Red Hat recognizes that modernization is an evolutionary process, and our customers need training material that is applicable to their work, regardless of the version that is running in their environment. Whether you are training on RHEL 8, RHEL 9, or somewhere in between, our training and certification offerings have you covered.

As learners begin their training journey, they are given the opportunity to select which release they would like to train on. As always, the gateway to the entirety of the Red Hat portfolio is Red Hat System Administration I (RH124) and II (RH134). Both of these courses have been updated to include a training experience specific to RHEL 9, with minor changes to accommodate the differences in software version. For those who have already begun their training journey with a version of RHEL 8, don’t jump ship quite yet — your training experience will still be applicable regardless of the version you selected. Red Hat’s flagship credential, the Red Hat Certified System Administrator, is version agnostic and can be earned on RHEL 8 or RHEL 9, so there is no immediate need to switch learning paths. 

Here’s what’s new in RHEL 9 that you can now find covered in Red Hat Training courses:

Installation and Registration

• Simple Content Access changes subscription management, removing many tasks related to preparing registered systems.

• Cloud Access methods, images and registration training content have been created to aid in the understanding of how to deploy simple RHEL instances to the cloud.

• Kickstart has been simplified and enhanced, with training updated to conform to new procedures and syntax.

Software Management

• Training courses will start using DNF commands to replace YUM commands.  YUM is still supported.

Networking

• Network teams are deprecated. The teamd service and the libteam library are deprecated in RHEL 9 and will be removed in the next major release. Our courses will revert to teaching network bonding instead.

• All firewall infrastructure based on iptables has been removed. The ability to migrate iptables configurations to NFT has been removed. Our courses will teach the standard NFT structures and methods.

Security

• SSH root access is now disabled by default.  RHEL 9 adds the following new options to the root password configuration screen:

  • Lock root account: To lock the root access to the machine

  • Allow root SSH login with password: To enable password-based SSH root logins.

• Support for disabling SELinux through /etc/selinux/config has been removed.  With this release, support for disabling SELinux through the SELINUX=disabled option in the /etc/selinux/config file has been removed from the kernel. When you disable SELinux only through /etc/selinux/config, the system starts with SELinux enabled but with no policy loaded.

Storage

• The exFAT filesystem is now supported in RHEL 9. This filesystem is used for external USB storage and interoperability and  data exchange with other operating systems, especially Windows.

• VDO management is now built into LVM. Volume management discussions will be updated to new syntax.

Containers

• Containers and tools were added in the most recent update to RH134, and the content remains valid. Podman now supports secure short names, which can be used in our examples.

Red Hat Training and Red Hat Consulting draw on deep product expertise with a focus on optimizing and modernizing your IT infrastructure, so you can take your business to the next level. As you plan and execute on your organization’s path forward, including a migration to RHEL 9, Red Hat Technical Account Managers (TAMs) serve as a single technical point of contact who help you plan and deploy Red Hat software more successfully and with an emphasis on security. We are committed to optimizing and modernizing your IT infrastructure, so you can take your business to the next level by automating and deploying applications faster. 

Explore how Red Hat training prepares you to manage your systems, including the new stability and security-focused features of RHEL 9, in the latest Taste of Training webinar.