Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

A few hours ago i received a mail from a Microsoft representative.

Microsoft will be conducting a three day focus group meeting from February 27, 2008 through February 29, 2008 to establish a fair passing score and identify the most relevant content for the LIVE exams:

[ Edited for NDA purposes ]

I am contacting you because you performed well on the betas for these exams.

If you choose to participate, you will be providing a key role in determining the final live exam content in addition to “setting the bar” that determines the standard required to gain certification for these exams.

I am inquiring as to your interest and availability for these sessions.

Well, urm, i was pretty shocked when i read this and at first thought that this was a scam. Thanks to the friendly help of Helmer i was advised that this is, in fact, the real deal.

Okay, so first things first: It looks like i passed both 70-646 and 70-647, which i didn’t really expect.

Microsoft is offering me a three day stay in Redmond, all expenses paid. I just hope i get my passport and visa covered until then. Looks like this is really going to get interesting!

A few days after i did 70-647, i attended 70-646.

My biggest worry was if Microsoft was able to really create distinguishing exams between the Enterprise Administrator and the Server Administrator part – and i think it worked out really well.

I attended this exam at BCD Sintrag, which isn’t my usual testing location either. Service was okay, no free drinks though.

The shift in focus on the Server Administrator exam is quite visible:

• There was a lot regarding to storage design and configuration – RAID levels, iSCSI, VDS, IO MultiPathing, iSCSI, FibreChannel
• Permissions, permissions, more permissions – Active Directory delegation and delegation of administrative privileges on servers
• The usual Terminal Server questions, and also several RAS questions (VPN, PPTP, SSTP, L2TP, TS Gateway, etc.)
• PKI questions till you puke – make sure to know about the PKI changes in Vista SP1 and how to administrate bigger PKI environments
• No design questions!
• A few firewall / IP configuration questions
• DHCP and a few basic subnetting questions

With this, i’ve got the two new MCITP exams done. Yay.

I’ll see the results in three months. If you want to do the beta exams too, check this posting on Trika’s most excellent certification blog.

A few days ago i posted that I will attend the 70-647 and 70-646 betas.

But luckily i was able to shuffle the 70-647 date back into this year – so i attended the 70-647 (Windows Server 2008, Enterprise Administrator) this morning.

I’m currently not in Horgen, so i attended the exam at a different Prometric testing center – this time at Alpha Solutions – the room was well lit, an older 15″ TFT at 1024×768, and a PC with acceptable performance. I was even provided a free drink.

So, what was in the exam?

This was an exam in the Pro-Series, so there were very few directly technical questions which required a direct answers – almost all questions focused on design or which tool to use.

• I’ve had many questions related to the usage of RODC, on their placement and which “parent” domain controllers they need, etc.
• A lot of question centered around applications and how they can be deployed – the answers usually involved GPO deployment, Softgrid Application Virtualization and of course Terminal Servers
• NAP was of course extensively covered, plus placement of remote access servers and NAP servers in a network
• Remote access and all of its possibilities (L2TP, PPTP, SSTP, TS Gateway, RPC over HTTP)
• The usual Active Directory design questions, which have gotten a bit more complex (Three functional levels: 2000, 2003, 2008)

There were no simulations, but i encountered a single Drag&Drop question. There were a lot more exhibits than in the TS exams, a few questions were worded awkwardly, but I didn’t find a question which I thought i answered wrong. I’m a lot more confident that I passed this exam than 70-649.

I’ll see the results in three months. If you want to do the beta exams too, check this posting on Trika’s most excellent certification blog.

Last week i took exam 70-431, the SQL Server 2005 TS Exam. I had a few vouchers left that had to be used anyway, and i wanted to try taking an exam about a topic which don’t know much about (just to see whether i’d pass).

As my preparation was nonexistent, and i didn’t eve give a close look to the preparation guide, i expected to fail – in the end, i never did much with SQL Server 2005, just the usual stuff with the Express versions used with SPS, WSUS, et. al.

When i started the exam, i was greeted with around 40 multiple choice questions, and about an hours of time. There were no questions related to hardware design/sizing, and nothing to feature licensing by edition – lots of Transact SQL questions though. After i was through with the 40 questions, i thought i was damned lucky for not having to deal with a single simulation – even though i thought i was only able to around 50% of the questions without guessing.

Turns out i was wrong – after closing the first part, a second part with 12 simulations opened. I solved them by first clicking on any element visible and looking at which ones where working. That way, i thought to be able to solve every one of them.

In the end i passed – with just 735 points. The result sheet listed the achieved score on both the multiple choice questions and the simulations seperately – 90% of the simulations were correct, but only 60% of the multiple choice questions.

For me, this was an interesting lesson – the Microsoft exams really *are* that easy.

On Trika’s Blog you can find the Promo Codes to register for the beta exams (free! double the questions! no broken simulations!) of the two newest Windows 2008 exams.

I was lucky enough to register for both exams, and i was also crazy enough to do both at the same day:

A few months ago, i did beta exam 71-649.

Finally, Microsoft posted the results – and i passed. This is great :)

Recently, Microsoft released exam 70-638 (no official info page yet, but it’s all in Trika’s Blog).

As you might know, i’ve played with OCS 2007 in the past few days, and i’ve got a few leftover exam vouchers anyway. So yesterday, i decided to sign up for 70-638, and do the test this Saturday morning. This was possible because my favorite testing center (Digicomp in Zurich) is now offering Saturday testing.

I didn’t really expect to pass this exam, but i did (with more than 800 points). Okay, so what did happen at this exam?

First, the hard facts:

• 1.5 hours of time (didn’t even need half of that)
• 40 questions
• Only multiple choice questions, no PBT, no drag and drop, no nothing

What did i do to prepare myself for this exam? Not much, really. I’ve deployed OCS 2007 internally in the past few days, and crossread a few deployment guides.

First off, the exam was structured completely different than what i expected after taking the 70-236 Exchange 2007 MCTS. The exam varied widely from installing, to configuring and design. As such, it was a more classical approach, covering all topics of OCS 2007 use.

The questions were well written, and a few of them were more or less exact duplication of content from the available deployment guides, with even the same names and everything.

There also were several design questions, for which you need to understand the general architecture behind OCS 2007 – that isn’t as difficult as it might sound, because OCS 2007 is rather well structured, and the infrastructure design is easy to learn.

No talk about hardware requirements, some questions about upgrading from LCS 2005, etc.

This exam is easy – not as easy as 70-620, but also less difficult than the Exchange 2007 MCTS/MCITP exams.

IBM Exam 000-074 is part of IBM’s Certified Systems Expert certification program. As with the similar HP0-055, the focus was a bit different than your usual Microsoft exams.

When first looking at the specs for this exams, i found the required passing score to be very low: 59%. HP’s exam had a passing score of 71%. As such, i expected a very difficult the exam, but that wasn’t the case.

This exam focused on three points:

• Normal, hardware neutral Windows/Networking Knowledge
• IBM Director Knowledge
• IBM System x hardware knowledge (especially of bigger products like the System x3850)

I’ve passed this exam with an okay score, but was guessing at almost all the IBM Director and the System x hardware knowledge. The problem here is that neither IBM Director nor 4 socket machines are being used in the small businesses i work for. The fact that i still passed shows that good guessing can give you lots of points, because the answers are sometimes rather obvious.

There was also a good deal of normal Windows Knowledge required, and several very very basic Networking questions, which could probably be answered by your average gamer kid. If you already hold an MCSE/MCSA on Windows Server 2003, you might be able to pass this exam without having touched an IBM server before.

Even though this may sound bad, i though the exam in it’s whole made a lot of sense. Most questions where detailed, and the answers where short an concise. Again, for several questions you had to know what the limitiations of a given IBM hardware platforms are. I still don’t really like this, because i don’t deal with every piece of System x hardware IBM has to offer (even though i’d like to know, that’s currently not the case).

As expected, there were many performance tuning questions which were usually answerable with general IT knowledge. You’ll just need to know which system performance values indicate what kind of performance bottleneck.

HP0-055 is the basic exam needed for the HP AIS certification. Together with some vendor exams (Like Microsoft’s 70-290, 70-291) you can already earn this basic HP Systems Integration certification.

HP0-055 is a normal test center exam. Priced at 163 CHF, it’s about a quarter cheaper than Microsoft’s exams (priced at 215 CHF).

If you’ve only done Microsoft exams before (like me), prepare yourself for a massive change of pace and question style. I had 88 questions and 2 hours to finish my exam. Less time and more questions than Microsoft. The question however are in a completely different format: There are usually only one or two lines of text, and the answers are even simpler. It’s quite possible to answer a question within less than 30 seconds.

HP offers Official Study Guide and Desk Reference, which i found utterly worthless, mostly because it reiterated facts i’ve known since several years (but might appeal to newcomers, like detailed explanations of raid levels, etc.).

The problem was that much of the exam didn’t really focus on the server itself, but instead on available service packages from HP, and the tools that HP offers for it’s customers. The latter aren’t covered in the before mentioned book, and i didn’t want to deal with most of them on productive servers after my experiences with IBM’s and DELL’s vendor tools.

Another part i found really annoying was that you were offered a problem, and then products to solve them. The products weren’t described, just their model. This can get quite annoying because i frankly don’t know every storage array, raid controller, server that HP has to offer without glancing at a web site.

I passed the exam barely, but i’m still disappointed with it’s quality. I think HP should put more emphasis on the hardware, and move away from questions that honor memorizing product names.

IT certifications usually serve two purposes: A point on your resume or partner programs. HP has a partner program, so they have certifications.

As such, it didn’t take to long until i had to deal with HP certifications. While there are many useful resources on the web regarding Microsoft’s certifications, this isn’t really true for HP certifications.

HP’s certification program offers much more sales certifications than Microsoft – IBM does this too. It’s important to know that the steps to your first exams are radically different from Microsoft’s approach.

The first step is to register for your own HP Student ID. You will need this to register with Prometric.

Now, HP offers two types of exams: Web based (Prefix HP2-) and normal test center based ones (Prefix HP0-). Web based exams are only available for unimportant err sales certifications and some device service certifications.

The list of available certifications is long, and in my opinion pretty irritating. There’s a “HP Certified Systems Engineer”, which is a HP-UX certification, and “HP Accredited Systems Engineer” which is a Systems Integration (read: Windows and Red Hat Linux) certification.

It’s important to know that if you want to go down the Systems Integration path, most of your already earned Microsoft credentials can apply to your HP certification path. This PDF contains all the information you need. The HP AIS certification requires a single HP exam (HP0-055, about which i’ll write tomorrow). HP’s exams are a bit less expensive than Microsoft’s exams, but they usually contain far more questions than Microsoft’s (HP: ~80, Microsoft: ~50).

Another important thing are web based exams. These are very inexpensive (25 US$), and can be done 24/7. They’re usually for sales and service certifications, contain about 50 questions and you have around 1.5 hours of time. The sales certification questions are unbelievably stupid, but not necessarely easy. You can of course use the internet to answer to questions (yes, that’s allowed). But it’s much funnier trying to get such an exam done in less than 20 minutes (which is easily possible).

In general, HP’s certifications aren’t bad – i like that most of your Microsoft certificates already apply, that the sales certifications can be done online (IBM does not offer that and Microsoft doesn’t offer sales certifications), but their web interface is awfully slow. I didn’t like their exams as much as Microsoft’s, but more about that tomorrow.