Red Hat certifications
Red Hat has one exam on this site, and it does not work like any of the others. EX200 is marked on what you actually make function on a running machine, so no part of it can be answered from a memory of question banks. That single design choice reaches much further than exam day: it changes how you must revise, what a pass tells a hiring manager, and what the credential asks of you every third year afterwards.
Exam delivery: Performance-based exams on live systems — in Red Hat testing centres, at training partners, as an individual exam session or remote; booked on redhat.com after choosing a location
RHCSA is the only Red Hat record here, an associate-level credential on exam code EX200, built on version 10 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There is not one multiple-choice question in it. You are put in front of live systems with work to complete: the shell and its everyday tooling, small scripts, boot targets and systemd units, local disks and logical volumes, filesystems and their permissions, packages, time synchronisation, scheduled jobs, accounts and groups, firewalling, SELinux, key-based access, and containers under podman. Configurations are expected to still be there after a restart, so a task you typed correctly but never made persistent counts as though you had not attempted it. Red Hat states neither how long the session lasts nor what score clears it, and the result reaches you by email within three American working days. Where the vendor withholds a figure, we leave it withheld.
You cannot read your way into a paper that marks what you built
Preparing for a knowledge exam is a coverage problem: work the objectives, drill the phrasing, sit mock papers until recall is fast. Almost none of that carries over, which is why no practice test exists for EX200 in our MeasureUp catalogue and why honest preparation means machines of your own. Red Hat's route is its RH124 and RH134 classes, or the condensed RH199, priced as corporate training; most individuals instead spin up two or three virtual machines, either genuine RHEL under a free developer subscription or a compatible rebuild such as AlmaLinux or Rocky, driven through the objective list until every task is reflex. Practise against a clock, because the binding constraint in that room is pace and not knowledge. What you buy at the end is a credential that says something unusually precise to an employer: on a given day, supervised, this person administered Red Hat systems and the outcome was inspected rather than asserted. Most certificates report that a candidate recognised correct answers. This one reports that the machine worked.
The vendor-neutral Linux papers cost less to keep and prove something narrower
The comparison deserves precision rather than a slogan. CompTIA Linux+ is not purely a recognition test either: its ninety-minute paper mixes performance-based items into a set of at most ninety questions, cleared at 720 against a band running from 100 to 900. What sets EX200 apart is that it has no recognition component at all to carry a shaky candidate over the line. LPIC-1 sits further away again, being two written papers of sixty questions each, part multiple choice and part answers you type. Where those two win is upkeep and access. LPI issues for five years, sells its exams in German among several languages, and lets holders stay valid by logging development units through a membership rather than sitting anything again; CompTIA runs three years and renews on continuing education. Red Hat also runs three years, and the only roads back are EX200 a second time, EX294 for the RHCE while yours still counts, or another paper from the architect track. A lapsed Red Hat certificate is described as non-current, never as expired, which is politer wording for the same recurring demand. So: take the RHCSA when the employers you want run Red Hat, or when you want a credential nobody can talk around. Take LPIC-1 instead when a German-language sitting matters to you, when nothing in your life gives you a machine to practise on, or when re-sitting a hands-on paper every third year is a promise you will break.
Associate
Frequently asked
- Can I prepare for EX200 from a book?
- Not from a book by itself. Reading tells you which command solves a problem; the exam asks you to run it correctly, on the right system, in a way that survives a reboot. Use the objective list as a checklist and work every item on real or rebuilt RHEL until the keystrokes come without thinking, then repeat the whole set under time pressure.
- How long is the exam and what score passes it?
- Red Hat puts neither on its public exam page. The scheduling confirmation carries the session length, and the outcome arrives by email a few US working days later. We would rather say that plainly than repeat a number somebody invented: any duration or cut score you find quoted elsewhere came from a candidate's recollection, not from the vendor.
- What happens when the three years run out?
- The certificate becomes non-current, which is Red Hat's term for lapsed. You restore it by passing EX200 again, by clearing EX294 for the RHCE before the clock stops, or by passing an exam that counts towards the architect track. There is no route through collecting credits, so budget the effort of a fresh hands-on sitting into every cycle.
Official certification portal: www.redhat.com/en/services/certification
Other vendors
Last reviewed 12 September 2026 · Getting Digital