CompTIA Cloud+ (CV0-001)

Overview

This section gives the information for CompTIA Cloud+ Certification. It is designed for IT professionals and covers private and public cloud infrastructures. Many companies are deploying cloud services in addition to, or in place of, traditional server infrastructure. It gives detailed foundational knowledge of cloud and virtualization technologies.

Cloud Services

This section explains some foundational concepts and terms. It covers what a cloud service is, its accountability and responsibility. It explores common cloud models which include Software as as Service(SaaS), Platform as a Service(PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS).

Cloud Delivery Models

This section discusses cloud delivery models, which is basically how the cloud services are provided to the end user. It explains the most common models, including Public, Private, Hybrid, and Community clouds.

Cloud Terminology

This section explains some of the terminology used in conversation pertaining to cloud services. It covers terms like Elasticity, Pay-as-you-grow, Chargeback, Multitenancy, Cloud bursting, and Rapid Deployment.

Object Storage Concepts

This section walks through common cloud storage concepts. It discusses how cloud providers store your data, benefits of using cloud storage, cloud storage characteristics, which introduce you to terms like BLOB(Binary Large OBject) and Identifiers, specifically Object ID and Metadata/Extended Metadata.

Virtualization Infrastructure

This section explores virtualization infrastructure. It discusses the benefits of virtualization such as elasticity, network isolation, and hardware consolidation. It explains the differences between the Type-II and Type-I hypervisors. At the end it covers some virtual cloud components like virtual NICs, CPU, RAM, and storage.

Virtual Machines

This section introduces you to creating and working with virtual machines. It covers the virtual hardware requirements for items like CPU and RAM. It explains the CPU’s special characteristics with regards to virtualization for both AMD and Intel chips. It also demonstrates how virtualization software allocates RAM for the guest Operating Systems.

Migrating Systems

This section explores some of the reasons and methods for migration in a virtual environment. It covers motives that could necessitate a migration, reasons like testing, upgrading, and/or performance issues. It also discusses some of the migration variations, including physical to virtual, virtual to virtual, and virtual to physical.

Snapshots and Backups

This section explains one of the most useful features of any virtualization platform and that is snapshots. It explains what a snapshot is and how they can be used to quickly restore a VM to a specific point in time. It covers taking backups in a virtualized environment, such as image and file backups.

Storage Configuration

This section explains some of the foundational information that is needed when working with attached storage in a private cloud environment. It covers common attached storage solutions like Network Attached Storage(NAS), Direct Attached Storage(DAS), and Storage Area Networks(SAN). It demonstrates protocols and media used to connect attached storage.

Storage Media

This section cover the common storage media, or drives, that you will work with when using a Storage Area Network(SAN) device. First It explains the different disk types such as SSD, spinning, USB, and tape. It also explains the different connectors and data transfer speed for SATA and SAS.

RAID and File Systems

This section walks through some of the common RAID levels employed in Storage Area Network(SAN) environments. It gives detailed information on RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 1+0, and 0+1. It explain some of the different filesystems like EXT, NTFS, and ZFS.

SAN Configuration

This section walks through configuring a Storage Area Network(SAN) appliance. It explains best practices and procedures for implementing a SAN and SAN’s interface.

Network Concepts

This section reviews basic networking concepts. It demonstrates the use of IP adresses and its breakdown. It explains the basics of classful and classless IP address spaces and the use of subnet masks.

Advanced Networking

This section discusses advanced networking concepts. It introduces virtual local area networks(VLAN) and IEEE 802.1Q VLAN trunks. It demonstrates bonding two or more switch ports through a technique call link aggregation. It explains some of the aspects of the network adapters needed in virtualization.

Networking Optimization

This section takes a look at different network optimization techniques. It explores different network types such as wide area networks, local area networks and metropolitan area networks. It discusses different techniques to keep these network connection running efficiently and effectively like clustering, load balancing, compression and caching.

Monitoring Resources

This section dives into monitoring resource utilization. It explains common resources that can effect performance such as CPU, RAM, disk I/O and network bandwidth.

Allocating Resources

This section dives into resource allocation and discusses the primary resources needed in virtualization such as memory, processing power, storage and network bandwidth. It explains best practices when assigning memory like dynamic versus static memory allocation and CPU allocation.

Remote Access

This section explores remote access technologies used to connect to cloud based virtual environments. It covers the difference between remotely connecting to a virtual machine host as well as a virtual machine guest.

Security Concepts

This section examines security concepts that helps to keep cloud-based solutions protected and available. It discusses technologies like virtual private networks (VPNs), software-based and hardware based firewalls, de-militarized zones (DMZs) and audit logs.

Storage Security

This section discusses storage security. It covers the topics like obfuscation,access controls lists (ACLs), users and host authentication through the challenge handshake authentcation protocol and log auditing.

System Hardening

This section focuses on the systems we use to access cloud based data. It introduces the concept of system hardening like disabling administrative accounts, changing default usernames and passwords, installing antivirus, patches and implementing host-based firewalls.

Policies and Procedures

This section covers the policies and procedure concepts to manage information technology based businesses. It discusses common concepts such as asset management, asset accountability and IP address management. It dives into the realm of capacity management and help to differentiate asset management from capacity management.

Performance Concepts

This section talks about the disk performance and disk-related concepts such as IOPS, reads vs. writes, metadata performance and caching. It demonstrates networking concepts like bandwidth, throughput, latency, jumbo frames, multipathing and load balancing.

Optimizing Performance

This section explores the techniques that can be used to optimize performance. It talks about the best practices that can be followed to maintain optimal performance like performance baselining, vendor-specific tools as well third party management tools.

Disaster Recovery

This section explores concepts related to maintaining business continuity through disaster recovery. It covers recovery time objective, recovery point objective, mean time between failure and repair. It also explains redundency and fault tolerance techniques such as high availability,local clustering and geolocation.