Tag: certification

Solaris 11 Certification Exam Comes off Beta Soon!

The new certification test from Oracle, Oracle Certified Associate, Oracle Solaris 11 System Administrator, is currently in beta and is priced much lower than the standard tests (US$50 compared to US$300). This test will help you get the certification of the same name. However, the beta period is ending soon: April 28, 2012.

Note that this is different from the Oracle Certified Professional, Oracle Solaris 11 System Administrator certification.

It is also still possible to get certified for Solaris 10.

Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) and HP-UX

HP-UX comes with VxFS (the Veritas File System) and the Logical Volume Manager (LVM). Only the on-disk filesystem layout comes from Veritas; HP’s volume management is all their own. There’s nothing wrong with HP’s LVM – I tend to prefer it, but then that’s what I know.

Veritas (now Symantec) offers another, competing product called Veritas Volume Manger (refered to as VxVM). The tools are different, the layout is different, and the capabilities are different. Knowing LVM won’t help you much, though the most basic concepts are the same: collect a series of disks together and then parcel them out as a single large group, with user-defined subdivisions.

Veritas Volume Manager is now a part of the Veritas Storage Foundation.

An nice set of links to documents can be found at Aziz’s Blog. In particular, the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide has been indispensable. Just about everything you can imagine you might need to do is located here.

Cuddletech offers the VxVM Quickstart with some older, but worthwhile documents that describe VxVM and its concepts. Likewise, Unixway offers a wide variety of documents on VxVM over several versions, as well as tutorials and more.

The AdminsChoice also has a good set of tutorials; there is Veritas Volume Manager part 1 and part 2 (focusing on vxassist).

There is a mailing list, but in recent months the activity has been rather sparse.

If you want to take your knowledge all the way, you can become Symantec Certified for the Veritas Storage Foundation (which mainly includes VxFS and VxVM).

Veritas VxVM works very well on HP-UX, and it is possible to create a root disk that utilizes VxVM and VxFS. When using VxVM, LVM is not used (unless a particular disk uses LVM instead of VxVM). The commands are the same across different platforms, and the on-disk layout is the same – so it should be possible to take a set of disks from a Solaris system and put them onto an HP-UX system and still read the data (but watch out for differing byte ordering!).

In the future I hope to discuss more on VxVM; we’ll see.

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Boost Your Career: Certifications

Certifications are a valuable item in this economy, and are useful to bolster and reinforce a background in supporting your chosen environment.

There are a number of certifications, both in type and in provider:

Of course, there are many others. One very good source for quite a few certifications in a broad range of areas is Brainbench. The Brainbench certifications are excellent, but I wouldn’t let that stop you from going for the software developer’s certifications either – get both.

Once you have earned your certifications, you can put them on your wall or in your résumé – or both. The certifications will help, though they are only one of the items that interviewers will look for: most important is hands-on day-to-day experience. However, certifications help give you an advantage over the competition. Go for it!

Learning resources

A lot of the stuff an admin deals with day to day isn’t based on what we know, but on what we can find out. We spend our days researching problems and looking for solutions. What are the best resources?

Each operating system vendor has their own knowledge base or forums. For example, HP has the HP ITRC (IT Resource Center) which provides a one stop source for forums, documentation, technical notes, patches, and more. Other vendors have similar portals for technical support.

Another lesser-known resource is Usenet. The people in the Usenet newsgroups include some very knowledgeable people, and often can help resolve problems faster than you can alone.

There are a number of books that one can turn to as well; however, books on certification may often be overlooked. These books cover more obscure areas of an operating system and its maintenance, and can point you in the right direction when nothing else will. Many times, these tomes are also written to be on-desk references as well, and as such include the author’s experiences and knowledge beyond what is needed for certification.