Pursuing MCSA server 2012, which exam path do I take?

I have a couple years of work experience with Server 2008 R2. Mostly AD administration but a bit of GPO as well. Almost no Hyper-V or NPS/NAP experience. I'm not sure what career path I want to go towards, but right now Private Clouds and Citrix are things that interest me. Server, systems or network administration looks good too.

I was thinking the 411 first, followed by the 410 and finish with either the 409 or 462. How useful would some SQL knowledge be for the above career paths?

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nachodba

The optimal track for you would be 410 (Install and Configure Server), 411 (Administer Server), 462 (Administering SQL Server). After that, depending on how much you wanted to go for SQL certs you would only need 461 (Querying SQL Server) and 463 (Data Warehouse) to get the MCSA SQL Server.

nster

EDIT: TY mods for moving to right forum!

yea 4 certs for 2 MCSAs looks nice, but how useful is SQL? I'm kind of scared by the 462, it looks quite difficult, 409 looks much more attainable lol. I was also scared off by the stories of 410 being really hard, figured getting the 411 would help confidence wise, but I can just prepare myself better I guess, and with the free second chance right now it seems a bit less scary.

I have no certs yet so all this is a bit intimidating. But I think this is doable. I wonder if this is doable in 3 months ish, I will be working 2 days a week in March April May. Take advantage of the second chance promo

Louie1277

Trust me it's hard but it will be good to pass it . I felt the same way about taking the exam. So many people saying how hard it is and failing. I myself failed twice already.. Didn't get enough lab work in was my issue and GP policy ...

I'm really wishing i pass it next month. I just bought other book last night so far i'm liking it how it starting.

nster

Louie1277 wrote: »

Trust me it's hard but it will be good to pass it . I felt the same way about taking the exam. So many people saying how hard it is and failing. I myself failed twice already.. Didn't get enough lab work in was my issue and GP policy ...

I'm really wishing i pass it next month. I just bought other book last night so far i'm liking it how it starting.

Thanks for that! So 410 -> 411 it is. Now to decide on the 3rd exam... :O

netsysllc

SQL is great to know but DBA is a far different career path than systems admin.

nachodba

Actually, there are several career paths for DBA's. Production DBA's are pretty much Systems Admins / Engineers that specialize on the management and maintaining of the SQL Environments, which is extremely admin skill heavy. Then your Development DBA's are the ones who work on creating and designing the databases, these don't need to know much about systems administration.

Pretty much, if you just want a quick MCSA, then just go 410,411,412. The SQL Exam is very T-SQL Heavy and it might not be worth the time if you are sticking in a strictly Sysadmin career path.

nster

nachodba wrote: »

Actually, there are several career paths for DBA's. Production DBA's are pretty much Systems Admins / Engineers that specialize on the management and maintaining of the SQL Environments, which is extremely admin skill heavy. Then your Development DBA's are the ones who work on creating and designing the databases, these don't need to know much about systems administration.

Pretty much, if you just want a quick MCSA, then just go 410,411,412. The SQL Exam is very T-SQL Heavy and it might not be worth the time if you are sticking in a strictly Sysadmin career path.

After thinking about it, I don't think SQL is in my immediate goals right now. I do want to further my knowledge in both sysadmin and virtualization though. Production DBA sounds like an interesting path to explore eventually though.

How hard is 412? How useful are the skills acquired from the studying? I'm thinking 74-409 could help my résumé a bit to show some virtualization, and I don't think the exam has been known to be too tough either. Then again, I've yet to see anyone using Hyper-V around here, everyone is on VMWare, so getting a few VCAs to get past HR and have a general overview of VMWare followed by VCP later on when I have a bit more experience with my home servers might just invalidate the 409

Thanks a lot for the guidance!

netsysllc

I have not done the 412, I did the 417 which is an upgrade exam. Either way you will have to learn about hyper-v as Microsoft expects that you will know it since it is part of the OS. SQL admin skills are great to know but I think they would greatly over complicate and extend your efforts to get a MCSA out further. I use Hyper-V and love it and use it at many clients as well, in SMB the value is hard to beat.