Performance management specialists and system administrators who are or will be responsible for the tuning and capacity monitoring of one or more machines running Linux.
Performance management requires an understanding of overall system architecture. This course takes the approach of tackling each major system of Linux individually, covering the necessary architectural background and then pointing out how resources are allocated, consumed, released, and reused. This course does not answer the question, "What do I change when I see such-and-such output from vmstat?" Instead, it takes a holistic approach that concentrates on understanding core system operations. Our goal is to provide a fundamental understanding of the Linux kernel so that as new updates are released, the student's existing knowledge base isn't rendered obsolete.
Some topics include information about running Linux inside a virtual machine but the focus of this course is Linux as a host operating system, not as a guest.
The course does not restrict itself to any given platform, but the Intel x86 environment is used for examples. Specifics of other hardware platforms are discussed only for comparison purposes.
This course currently targets Linux kernel version 3.10 and later, which means distributions beginning with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Ubuntu 14.04, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, and others. Some references are made to earlier kernel versions for critical analysis purposes.
All information required for a proper understanding of the course material will be provided; however, one year of hands-on experience with software installation, building applications from source code, and similar administration topics will prove helpful.