Red Hat Virtual Training

Did you know Red Hat’s introducing online training? When we heard that, we went digging to find somebody that could tell us more. Joshua M. Hoffman, the Product Manager for Virtual Training / Live Access Labs, was willing to fill us in. So here’s the details on Linux training… from the comfort of your living room.

1. What is virtual training? How does it work?

Red Hat Virtual Training is Red Hat Training, online. Attendees view instructor presentations live over the web from their home or office. Each attendee is assigned a workstation in the Red Hat Live Access Labs, to use for the class lab work. The instructor performs demos and answers questions live, just like in the classes in our training centers.

To take a class you need broadband internet and a browser with a Java plugin. It doesn’t matter which OS you have on your machine as you’ll be doing all the lab work on your assigned workstation. Class enrollment is the same as with our regular training. Virtual Training class names just end in ‘VT’, like ‘RH033VT.’

2. Who is your target audience and where is it being offered?

Typically these are people who live in areas that do not have a nearby Red Hat training facility. It might also be people who can’t get away from work for a whole week, or companies that need onsite training but have employees spread out in multiple cities.

3. Which certifications are available now, and are there plans to add more?

We are currently offering the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) curriculum, but we do not offer the exams online. The Red Hat certification program has pretty strict guidlines, so you have to take the exam in a training center with a Red Hat examiner.

4. What made you decide to move online? How did it happen? (Tell us the story!)

A little over a year ago I was working on courseware for Red Hat Virtualization. The more I dug into our virtualization technology, the more impressed I was with its flexibility. As a learning exercise, I created a virtual classroom on one host using virtual machines. The idea was to make it as close as possible to the setup in a training center classroom. Around that time, myself and a few others were asked to explore ways to bring Red Hat Training online. It was clear to me that virtualization would play a key roll. I presented my ideas, cobbled together a proof-of-concept, and before I knew it I was giving a lesson to Mathew Szulik in Raleigh, NC, from my apartment in Washinton, DC.

The tricky part was how to give online attendees the same level of training experience that they would get attending a Red Hat course in one of our training centers. I took the virtual classroom I had built, and added a prototype web interface. The idea being that an online participant would be able to do everything with their virtual classroom workstation that they would be able to do with a workstation in a training center.

At the Red Hat Summit in San Diego, I showed my prototype to several people, including Rik Van Riel. When Rik said it was cool, I knew I was on to something :)

Shortly after that Summit, we started a new team to design and build the production version of what would become our Virtual Training / Live Access Labs systems.

5. What was your role in the project? Did you have to overcome challenges? What was the biggest surprise?

I built the first prototype of what would become Red Hat Live Access Labs. I also did the overall design for the production version. In addition, I’ve written the client software used by the instructor doing the remote presentation. I am a true believer in Open Source, and one of the biggest challenges I gave myself was completing the Virtual Training system without using any proprietary software. I was pleased to find that there were many great open source bits and pieces available that we were able to incorporate.

6. Where do you see this whole thing going? Will you partner, or plan to add new (or exclusive) courses to your own services?

The current system is designed to scale and thats exactly what we want to do. We’d eventually like to get all of our training courses available in the Virtual Training format. There’s some work to do before we can run some of the advanced classes, but we’ve got plans. I’d also like to expand into media rich, pure online courses.

As far as partnering–sure why not? It would have to make sense in terms of allowing us to maintain open source ideals while providing even more value to the customers.

7. What sets Red Hat Online Training apart from other online coursework? How many students do you have so far?

That’s a great question. It comes down to two things.

First, the training is conducted live by the same Red Hat Instructors who teach the classes in our training centers. The virtual training participants get to learn from the same experts that make our classroom training great.

Second would be our Live Access Labs. The participants get on the web and do lab work on virtual classroom workstations. The stations running the same configuration as our training center workstations are huge. Plus the Live Access Lab machines are available outside of class hours, so there is plenty of time for practice and experimentation.

To sum it up, participants get to learn from–and interact live with–Red Hat expert trainers in real time and work on virtual lab machines running the actual products. No simulators or canned presentations.

So far we have run two pilot sessions with paying customers and the feedback has been great.

8. Of course we have to ask the all important tech question: what’s the hardware / software architecture behind the scenes? (We know it’s running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but what /else/ makes it go?)

The Virtual Training / Live Access Lab system is a scalable cluster of boxes running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (no surprise there!). The great flexibility of Red Hat Virtualization was key for us. Libvirt is great and we used it heavily in the software that ties it all together, which we wrote in Python. We also use icecast, Apache, and a few other open source goodies.

9. Anything else you need to mention that we missed?

Anyone interested in more information, or who wishes to enroll in classes, should check out the Virtual Training website.

This entry was posted by the editorial team on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.