07 February 2011

70-652 - Windows Server Virtualization


I’m at the Digicomp testing center right now and waiting for my collegue to finish the exam too.
In General, my impression was that the exam was pretty solid but certainly “Enterprise Heavy” in focus. There were a lot of questions regarding appropriate configurations for failover clustering, and also several pieces of SCVMM 2008 (the latter though were never hard – anyone who has toyed with SCVMM and browsed through the main functionality should be able to answer them).
I’ve seen a few questions that weren’t worded 100% precisely, but that can always happen – the quality was generally high.
Other areas that were featured heavily:
  • Clusters (as mentioned above)
  • Snapshots – especially pay close attention on how Snapshots can be reverted, reused, etc. Snapshots can also be used in deployment scenarios
  • Integration between SCOM and SCVMM
  • Disk configuration – the available options for VHD files, their advantages and disadvantages, the usage of physical disks from the host and of course the use of iSCSI disks that are directly attached in the VM
  • Hardware requirements and configuration requirements when setting up Hyper-V – pay close attention on how you configure the Windows Bootloader, and what necessary steps need to be taken when enabling hardware assisted virtualization in the BIOS
  • Proper VM hardware configuration – remember which controllers in Hyper-V are bootable and which are not. Also, think about very old legacy applications that might have problems with newer CPU features available on modern CPUs and about the implications of running an OS that does not support synthetic hardware
  • Network configuration – pay close attention to bigger scenarios involving the cluster heartbeat link, iSCSI connections from the host, iSCSI connections from the VMs themselves, Quorum disks in cluster scenarios. Also, remember the difference between internal and private network interfaces
Did i pass? I’m not sure. There were many cluster questions, and i never had much contact with those since i primarily work with Small Business customers.
So if you intend to go at this exam, make sure you’ve toyed around with SCVMM (SCOM knowledge not necessary, just look up on how these two can be integrated). Also, make sure you’ve setup a Hyper-V cluster at least once. You can emulate an iSCSI SAN by using an open source appliance like FreeNAS that can export disks using iSCSI. None of the questions i’ve seen seemed “hard” to me, but i was guessing at a few because i didn’t know about the topic.
Good luck!

6 comments:

  1. I hope the best to you in passing :D

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  2. These things seem to have SOOOO much more stuff now compared to when I was learning Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000...damn. I only ever took (and passed) two tests. Probably would've paid off better to have gotten all the exams done and skipped out on college insteaad. :(

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