Passed 70-410 Today...Much More Difficult Than Practice Exams

gphalpin

Hi Everyone,

I passed the 70-410 exam today. It was much tougher than the Sybex practice exams that go with William Panek's Study Guide. I scored in the 90s on most chapter exams and practice test. While I thought the book was good, there were some items on the exam that were not covered in the book.

Just to give you some background, I earned an MCSA way back in 2002 and have been a Sys Admin\Security Analyst since about 2003. I know AD and group policy inside and out. I read Panek's book cover to cover and watched the Lynda.com Windows Sys Admin video series to catch up on anything I haven't worked with. I thought I was going to breeze through the exam. I quickly realized it was more difficult than expected.

A big challenge for me was that we don't use Microsoft virtualization where I work and I have zero experience with it. I've been administering VMware environments for about 8 years and am very familiar with that. When it comes to networking, I have a CIDR table taped above my monitor and have forgotten how to count binary in the IPV4 octets and figure out the right subnet masks. So those two areas were tough for me.

Not sure if I'm going to proceed with tests 411 and 412. I'd like to get the full MCSA again. But we use a lot of non-Microsoft products for storage, DNS, IPAM, and network security, etc where I work. So I'd have to study for a lot of things I wouldn't use. I took the exam mostly to meet one of my goals at work to get training and prove proficiency on 2012-R2. But I'm glad I did it. I've been putting the PMP exam on the back burner this past year. That's a goal of mine for 2017.

AndersonSmith

I found the Panek book to be very subpar while studying for the MCSA. It gives a brief overview of a lot of things without diving deeply enough into the technologies to pass the exam. It also lacks on Powershell quite a bit. The practice exams with the book are pretty much useless as well because they only cover what the book covers. Don't give up if you want to earn the full MCSA. There are tons of really great resources out there to help you pass! Congrats on passing the 410!

gespenstern

I failed after Panek and passed after Mackin. Hard to tell what worked here, but these are facts.

gphalpin

AndersonSmith,

Thanks for encouraging me to keep going for the full MCSA.

I recall reading in another post or comment that you substituted the 411 or 412 exam with another exam. How did you go about doing that? Did you have to request permission to do it first or does Microsoft automatically count certain exams as credit toward the MCSA?

I agree about the book lacking in PowerShell. It's funny because I remember the book stating a couple times how important Powershell is and that the book would get into more detail on it but it never did.

Thanks,

Greg

gphalpin

Thanks, gespenstern, I'm looking at the book on Amazon right now. It's about half the size of Panek's book that covers the upgrade exam. But if it works, it works.

AndersonSmith

gphalpin wrote: »

AndersonSmith,

Thanks for encouraging me to keep going for the full MCSA.

I recall reading in another post or comment that you substituted the 411 or 412 exam with another exam. How did you go about doing that? Did you have to request permission to do it first or does Microsoft automatically count certain exams as credit toward the MCSA?

I agree about the book lacking in PowerShell. It's funny because I remember the book stating a couple times how important Powershell is and that the book would get into more detail on it but it never did.

Thanks,

Greg

Hey Greg,
I substituted the 412 exam with the 409 exam - Server Virtualization. It just made a lot more sense to me as the topics covered on the 412 were things I wouldn't need in the environment I currently work in and virtualization was something I was much more interested in anyway. Also, it's kind of like a 2 for 1 deal when you pass the 409 because you also get the MS Server Virtualization certification as well as the MCSA Server 2012 cert.
No, you don't have a to request permission from Microsoft, you just take the 410 and the 411 and then take the 409 and Microsoft will automatically give you the MCSA Server 2012 certification for completing the required exams. Actually you can take them
in any order, that's just the order I did them in.
From what I have heard, the 409 is supposedly much easier than the 412 as well, although I can't particularly weigh in on that because I didn't take the 412, although I will say studying for the 409 only took me about 5 weeks compared to the 12 or so I used for the other two. Some of the topics covered on the 412 are covered on the 409 though. One of the things I think that makes
taking the 409 easier too is that a lot of the Hyper-V topics that are covered on the 410 are covered on the 409 so since you've already taken the 410 you'll have some "prerequisite" knowledge already of some of the technology. There are also a lot of great
free resources for the 409 exam such as the MVA videos, the Veeam Study Guide, YouTube videos, etc.