70-412 passed, MCSA 2012 Complete!

Kyrak

Well I didn't feel I was 100% ready but I 1) had a free test and a free retest if I failed and 2) wanted to try to get in under the wire for the free test upgrade to the 2016 MCSA. And I was right about not being ready! I squeaked by with a 700 score on 70-412. It was definitely the hardest of the three for me. It was really difficult to wrap my head around some of the federated services / trust concepts, but I was able to get a good enough handle on it towards the end of my studying.

Prep was 2 weeks of 4 hours a day classes, 20 years of experience, Pluralsight Videos, CBT Nuggets Videos, CareerAcademy videos on any spots I was still rusty on, Transcender practice exams, technet for detail (especially about Forest / Domain functional level type stuff), and of course lab, lab, lab. I have spent almost every waking moment prepping (when I wasn't doing job search) and my social life has gone to ****, but I know when I get a job this would be 10 times harder.

Back when I was studying for my VCP, I bought a HP DL-385 Server (2x8 core processors and 24GB Memory) on eBay for $127+$50 shipping and put ESXI on it and it has been awesome for setting up all the stuff to test different things out. With this setup you can virtually set up almost any environment and can learn a lot about virtualized networking in the process too. Make sure you get an SSD for it though (you can use consumer grade SSD's with an adapter).

MCSE is somewhere in the future (not sure if I want to do SI or PC), but I'm one week into classes towards my CCNA so that is my focus for now. Thanks everyone for the posts about passing (and failing too). It gives you encouragement to go for it when you see others have success.

Kyrak

Piers

Congratulations!! I passed my final MCSA test with a 700 as well, it counts!