Exam 70-659 Microsoft Server Virtualization

I took and passed this exam today, not as straightforward as I thought it would be.

I pretty much used ‘Mastering Microsoft Virtualization’ by Tim Cerling at al, and a VMWare Workstation based lab to do the hands-on. Pretty solid book and I now have an extremely good understanding of the underlying Hyper-V architecture, especially CSV.

It has actually made me look forward to Hyper-V v3.0 to be released with Server 8/2012 later this year 🙂

Anyway back to the exam, aside from the usual multiple choice there were a number of other formats. The one that was new to me was a bunch of questions where you were presented with the same (or very similar) long list of possible answers ranging from A – M, except the answers were re-arranged & some questions had a few less possible answers to choose from. There were about 6 of these questions and they all came one after the other.

There was also the ‘pick the click’ right answer when presented with a graphic to select from. Also another format where you had to pick say 3 correct blocks of answers out of 5/6 and then you HAD to arrange them in the correct sequence order. I found these questions consumed a lot of my time, subtle difference between similar answers had me scratching my head at times!

Lots of questions on RDS, about 10. A couple of questions involved DPM 2010 (don’t worry, nothing deep) and a bunch of questions around using/understanding SCVMM 2008R2. Know the difference between 2008 and 2008R2 failover clusters (i.e. no CSV/Live Migration on 2008). Make sure you have some hands on with SCVMM, know your P2V best practice, and understand disks as related to hyper-v.

Right. So next move is to obtain the full MCSE:Cloud,

which means one more exam, 70-246 – Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012:

The other pre-reqs for MCSE:Cloud are Exam 70-247 (which until December 2013 you have the option of completing 70-659 instead). and having an MCSA in Server 2008 (I already have the MCITP Enterprise Admin!).

All good stuff, i’ll be sitting 70-246 in July and will report back then as this is a totally new exam to be released in June and there is not much material available to study.