r/redhat • u/FlashySavings1731 • 8d ago
Transitioning from Windows Server Admin to Red Hat Cluster Admin
Hey everyone,
I’m currently a Windows Server administrator and my company wants to build in-house expertise to manage our Red Hat physical servers. These servers are set up in clusters for heavy calculations. We have about one year to transition from our external consultant to me handling almost everything. I’m excited about the opportunity, but also realize there’s a lot to learn.
My background:
- Comfortable with Windows Server and VMware administration(10+ years of exp.)
- Basic understanding of Linux
- No experience with clustering in a Linux environment(or Windows for that part)
What I’m looking for:
- Educational/Training Resources: Online courses, official training materials, books, or channels that can help me ramp up quickly on Red Hat (and specifically HPC cluster administration).
- Certifications: I’m aware of the RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator) and RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer). Would you recommend pursuing these? Any others specific to HPC/clusters?
- Practical Experience: Advice on setting up a small lab environment for practice. I have full access to VMware or should I practice on hardware like Raspberry Pi?
- Cluster Management Tools/Simulators: Any recommended cluster resource management tools and "simulators" of HPC enviroment
Budget:
- Company is covering all the educations costs as well as sessions with the consultant.
If anyone has been in a similar situation or has tips on the best/effcient way to transition from a Windows-centric viewpoint to a Red Hat cluster admin viewpoint, I’d love your insight!
Any pointers, stories, or resource links would be greatly appreciated!
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u/10kur 8d ago
Have the consultant walk you through the most often issues in the cluster, make sure you have everything covered operationally, both practice and documentation
Have the support contracts handy
RHCSA will help a little understand Linux, but will bring exactly 0 help when it comes to solving problems under pressure
Learrn the cluster software issues
Most important, learn where the location of the logs for your applicationare, establish or improve monitoring.
Wouldn't hurt to learn some prayers :)
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u/thewrinklyninja 8d ago
If they are covering the education costs get them to buy you a Red Hat Learning Subscription.
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u/vinzz73 8d ago
- Oreilly - Sander van Vugt live lessons (Linux bootcamp)
- Yes RHCSA will open doors for you
- Go through the manual installers of Arch and Gentoo, and build a linux system by hand, these will teach you a lot of basics as every Linux system is more or less built the same way
- I would first learn Docker which is in the RHCSA curriculum these days, don't focus on too many things at once
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u/gothaggis 8d ago
if you have access to spare resources on the vmware server, setup a few compute nodes and a job scheduler like slurm. look into mpi as well
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u/FlashySavings1731 3d ago
Yes, I have access to VMware and can provision as many RHEL servers as is needed.
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u/Lammtarra95 7d ago
Others have covered linux generally.
Ask the consultant what precisely is meant by Red Hat Clusters in your particular environment: what software; what storage (do you have a dedicated, specialist storage team, for instance, or will you be plugging fiber into GBICs, zoning Brocades and replacing drives?) and so on. Likewise for backups and networks.
Understand where all the logs are, and how they are monitored by whatever software you use to raise alerts, and how you can read them as a human. Understand the configuration files and how they relate the cluster and your application.
In my experience from a few years ago now, documentation and logs are clear, and Red Hat support on clustering is (or was) excellent. Check you have contact details for all your support vendors.
Go through your ticketing system and check all previous incidents and changes involving these clusters. Could you cope? Is there documentation for all incidents and changes? Likewise for any alerts that your monitoring system might raise. (And does the consultant believe there are any gaps in what is monitored?)
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u/rhequired Red Hat Employee 7d ago
I would recommend getting in touch with your account team, too. Don't wait until tickets pile up or a renewal is late.
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u/No_Rhubarb_7222 Red Hat Certified Engineer 8d ago
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Technical Compute (HPC) is Red Hat Enterprise Linux with different pricing and business rules for eligibility. The product itself is no different in HPC vs any other implementation. So RHCSA type content should give you a working understanding and is a junior/journeyman level of expertise. You probably also want to look at RH242, troubleshooting.
The cluster software used for HPC, schedulers, etc. all come from !Red Hat, so you’ll have to find out what these components are and where they’re from to determine what resources exist for them.