MCTS 70-652 - Study tips and links
I’ve just this afternoon passed the Microsoft 70-652 exam, making me an MCTS for Windows Server Virtualisation.
I didn’t get a lot of time to study and basically spent the best part of yesterday and this morning using the exam preperation guide, technet and google to piece together everything I needed to know. There is not a lot of published material out there at the moment, most of the books on amazon, etc appear to be due out later this month, so it was a bit of a struggle.
With this in mind I thought it would beneficial to publish some of the websites that I used for studying and clarifying specific points.
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As mentioned above the MS 70-652 Exam Preperation Guide was a great starting point.
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The Microsoft free E-Learning course 5935 - Introducing Hyper-V in Windows 2008.
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The Microsoft free E-Learning course 6334 - Exploring SCVMM 2008.
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The Technet page for Hyper-V , Work through each section it doesn’t take to long.
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The Technet page for SCVMM 2008, again work through each section.
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The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, read the server consolodation scenarios.
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Robert Larson’s building a host cluster with Hyper-V, essential reading.
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Scott Lowe’s article on SCVMM 2008, insight into SCOM and SCVMM integration.
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Ben Armstrong’s article on Allowing non-administrators to control Hyper-V.
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MS Server Team article on configuring pass-through disks in Hyper-V.
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The Technet how to Videos on SCVMM 2007 great material if you have no lab.
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This article on Emulated and Synthetic drivers, now your IDE and SCSI VM Controller.
Other pointers I can give you, well brush up on the following especially
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Disks - know the different types and how they work, IDE and SCSI controllers
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Snapshots - really know this, even snapshots for deployment?
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Networking - know the different types and how they work.
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Larger Networks - Think of ISCSI host connections and cluster heartbeats.
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Failover Clustering - It’s key to Hyper-V availability so make sure you know it.
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SVCMM - SCOM integration and migrating VMs between hosts.
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Hyper-V - know how to install both full and server core versions.
I’m glad I took the time and did the exam, unfortunately I won’t get much of a chance to use the skills in the day job as we currently utilise VMWare. However I have seen enough during my revision and lab testing to see that Microsoft have got themselves a very good base product. With the Windows 2008 R2 release being worked on I can only imagine it will get better. Enjoy studying…. (if that’s possible!!)
