Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

This morning i attended the Beta for Exam 70-680 – i was one of the lucky few that got a seat in this beta.

I already did 70-270 (Windows XP) and 70-620 (Windows Vista) two years ago, and the Vista exam was far too easy for my taste. It took me about 20 minutes, and i walked out with a score about 900. That’s not good – too easy questions will just devalue the certification.

With this in mind, i expected 70-680 to get Microsoft back on track, and they did. The exam has much better and much more difficult questions than 70-620. Not questions which require you to memorize stuff, but questions which require you to understand the subject matter.

As usual for beta exams, there were no simulations, VM tasks or anything else except multiple choice questions. I can understand why that’s the case (they probably want to use the final version for that), but i’m still not entirely with this as it is.

One thing that was new in this exam is that you get a questionary that asks you to judge your knowledge levels on Windows 7 for yourself. Several fields are presented, in which you have to choose between very high, high, mediocre, low and very low skills – another questions asks how much experience you already had with Windows 7 (with options such as “Over a year”).

I think that’s a good idea – most exam betas are open now, which means that many less-skilled people will also attend them. As long as those are truthful, this can actually help to improve the exam.

Unfortunately, i had very much difficulty finding what’s my personal baseline. I opted to choose either High or Mediocre for most answers, but was that correct? What does high mean? What does mediocre mean? What’s my knowledge level?

It might make sense to ask questions which are more task oriented – if you already did a task X and if you think if you’re proficient at doing task X.

The exam content was pretty much what was in the official docs – there’s a lot more focus on using group policies (local ones in this case), and also a few more detailed networking questions regarding Subnetting, in both IPv4 and IPv6.

General list of things i’ve seen:

• New features: BranchCache, DirectAccess and VPN (not overly technical – if you got it to work once, you can answer these)
• Bitlocker – not overly many questions
• Setup – the USB stick install gets featured more
• USMT gets a lot more focus and also Windows EasyTransfer
• Imaging, Deployment, VHDs

I’ll see if i passed the exam in officially 8 weeks, so probably in about 4 real moths ;)

As our Microsoft Partner Program Renewal Date is coming up, i decided to do some work to get everything together and go Gold Certified.

With just a bit of work, this has worked out (the number of sales we made also played into that).

If you’re wondering how we got 120 points with us being a rather small company, it’s quite easy:

• Get two competencies – for this you’ll need:
  • Two MCPs with relevant certs
  • The Information Worker & Network Infrastructure competencies are the easiest
  • Three customer references per competency minimum – 10 customer references total to get full points
• A total of 10 customer references – you’ll need only 6 if you have 18 points for Sales Performance
• Microsoft Small Business Specialist for 5 extra Points – for this you’ll need 70-282 and an online exam.
• A minimum of 7 points through MCPs – two MCITP/MCSE and one MCP will give you that
• A minimum of 10 points of Sales Performance

This should give you a total of 122 points – more than enough for a Gold Certified Partner!

As a side note, my current employer Acommit AG also has a job opening in a Systems Engineer position. If you have strong Windows, Exchange and IBM i skills and thinking of working for a company near Lake Zurich, apply now!

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!

So yesterday i ranted about being unable to register for exam 70-652, and not getting any help from Prometric.

I have to remedy that – when i checked my email this morning, i already got notice from Prometric asking for my MCP and Testing ID – i replied quickly, and got a an answer back in just a few minutes. This is good!

I’ll be going this Friday and see how it was.

I received this nice mail from Microsoft learning:

You are invited to take beta exam 70-652: TS: Windows Server Virtualization, Configuring. You were specifically chosen to participate in this beta because of your current Microsoft Certification status or previous participation with Microsoft Learning. If you pass the beta exam, the exam credit will be added to your transcript and you will not need to take the exam in its released form. The 71-xxx identifier is used for registering for beta versions of MCP exams, when the exam is released in its final form the 70-xxx identifier is used for registration.

By participating in beta exams, you have the opportunity to provide the Microsoft Certification program with feedback about exam content, which is integral to development of exams in their released version. We depend on the contributions of experienced IT professionals and developers as we continually improve exam content and maintain the value of Microsoft certifications.

70-652: TS: Windows Server Virtualization, Configuring counts as credit towards the following certification(s).
• TS: Windows Server Virtualization, Configuration

So i tried to sign up for the exam. But i wasn’t even able to logon to my Prometric account.

Got the following error message:

Duplicate emails. Please call customer service.

So, i tried calling customer services. It’s a toll free Swiss number in a call center located at some other part of the earth. Unfortunately, i wasn’t even able to place a call

The number you’re calling is currently unavailable. Please check the number and dial again

So i mailed Prometric support and i’m hoping for an answer now.

If Prometric won’t fix it, at least i can ask Helmer what was in the exam. If you have a working Prometric account, you can get the invite code for the exam from Trika’s Blog

Update: Prometric fixed the problem quickly

I’ve participated at a game at the TechDays Switzerland, and didn’t win an X-Box.

Well, at least i got my picture and story published on the Microsoft Learning Website.

(Still happy, still not better than you)

Well, not really. But exam results are still a good ego boost ;)

Thanks to Trika and her Microsoft Learning Team.

UPDATE:

The Microsoft transcript has already been updated, and you can order your Welcome Kits and downloads the logos:

Today and yesterday went by pretty well. We’ve spent a lot of time working on the exams and the only bad thing about it is that i can’t write about all the juicy details here (NDA).

One of the really good parts about it was that you could hook up with other people that also have A LOT of knowledge about and enthusiasm about their work.

Especially when talking about Microsoft technologies, nobody at my company wants to argue with me. This was different here, and i really enjoyed that.

It’s also great to see that Microsoft exams are a lot of hard work and a huge investment by Microsoft in order to provide up to date and accurate tests.

Keep in mind that when you make a Comment at a Beta Exam / Exam that they’ll be read by real people – they DO make a difference. So whenever you do not like a question for any reason, make a comment. It counts.

So, what now? It’s 1500 here right now, so i’ll try to find a few fun things to do before going to sleep. The same goes for tomorrow morning, my flight leaves at tomorrow 1600. And i’ll be back in Switzerland on Sunday 1200.

So it appears that i’ve survived my 16 hour trip from Zurich to Seattle, and i was even able to enter the US. Which is a good thing.

So, now i’ve spent a day at the Microsoft Campus and have worked on one of the exams. Unfortunately, i can’t tell write about the juicy details, but one thing is clear:

Microsoft Learning really makes a big effort in order to ensure that the quality of the exams is as high as possible. Much care is being taken to ensure that exam content is accurate, up to date and clear.

There were seven other people there with me, most of them know a lot more about this stuff than I do (which, I think, is rather good for my Ego).

So, if you ever sit in front of and Exam and think that a question is stupid and can’t be answered, it’s probably a good idea to think again – it probably makes sense, and you missed something (read carefully!).

So, what else to say?

• I’ve got a really nice rental car
• The hotel room is nice, big, comfortable bathroom, etc. everything you could ever wish for
• Americans have really strange ideas what “Breakfast” is – not that i don’t like it, it is just strange
• Transatlantic flights suck if you’re obese
• ZRH-SEA jetlag isn’t that bad. The other way around will probably be a lot worse
• My spoken English isn’t as bad as i thought
• Microsoft still uses CRTs
• AVIS in Seattle still has System i Twinax Screens in operation
• Cups and dishes made from Polystyrene (essentially Styrofoam) are popular here(?)
• Burger King has french fries boxy-thingies that fit into a cars cup holder
• There is such a thing as a Microsoft Dining Services eCoupon

It’s certainly interesting here. Hope the next two days turn out as well.

So i’ve finally received a pile of legal paperwork from Microsoft, plus everything about expenses.

I’m now trying to plan a trip to Redmond, but it seems difficult within the allocated expense budget.

I don’t have a lot of experience planning international trips, but so far it is looking nicely. And yes, i have to sign an NDA, which means i won’t be able to blog a lot about this, which is sad but understandable.

I’ve also submitted all my biometric identification, so i should have a nice biometric passport by next thursday. Which is also cool :)

But hey, i’m really looking forward to this!