Passed the 70-410!!!

shaun5263

Well I finally took the 70-410 today and passed with a 737. This was my first attempt at the exam. Here's what I did to prepare over the last 2.5 months:

Books
-Read the Exam Ref cover to cover. This book was ok as an introduction to the objectives but does not go into the depth required for the exam.
-Skipped around to relevant chapters in the Sybex Mastering 2012 R2 book. This is a great resource and I'd recommend it as a reference even if you're not preparing for certification.
-I bought the training guide late in the game. I read and labbed a few of the chapters. It could be helpful but most of my labbing was based off of reading the objectives and performing what they listed. It does go into greater detail than the exam ref and shows powershell examples as well.

Training Videos
-Watched some of the Pluralsight/Trainsignal videos. These are good for an overview of the objectives but don't go into great detail. The group policy and hyper-v sections were helpful though.
-Watched all of the CBT Nugget videos for this exam. These were a great resource and the instructor had a great way of keeping things interesting. I enjoyed this set of videos and would recommend checking them out. They offer a free 7 day trial.

Practice Tests
-I used selftestsoftware.com for my first set of practice tests. They offer a pretty challenging bank of questions that I think were very helpful for preparation. The provided great detail as to why answers were right/wrong and gave links to relevant technet articles. Some of the questions were pretty in depth and had a lot of answer choices which could take a while to sort everything out.

-I also received free access to Measureup.com when I purchased my test voucher. These tests were pretty good as well though some of the explanations for the answers were not quite as good as selftestsoftware in my opinion. They do also provide links to relevant articles.

Web
When I hit something I needed more information on, I'd run to google and start researching. Often times landing on technet articles, blogs or forums. I read a lot of posts in the techexams.net forum and asked some questions of my own. The sticky post with all the technet articles is a great resource. I also read about of a lot of successes and failures regarding the exam and found the most common reason for failures seems to be to be lack of hands on.

This is a test that would be tough (if not impossible) to pass without working with the 2012 R2 OS and its features. There are many ways to perform a lot of functions and its critical to practice and know them all (GUI, Powershell, and CMD in a lot of cases). If you have Windows 8.1, install Hyper-V to host your VMs. It's not the same as server Hyper-V but you can do a lot with it in a test setting and you will get to know a lot of its features hands on. If you've got a spare machine or server, that's even better! Personally, I installed Hyper-V on Windows 8.1 on a machine with only 4GB of RAM. I installed a 256GB SSD to improve performance and was able to run 4-5 thin provisioned machines with minimum RAM at a time.

Thanks to those who responded to my questions in this forum and good luck on the exam!

thatguy67

Congrats man! I know Microsoft exams can be a pain. Lots of folks have a bear of a time with that exam...feel good and treat yourself.