Need help with 290

internet-guy

I took the 290 on Friday (Mar 16th) and failed with a 531. My weakest points were Access to Resources and Disaster Recovery. Can anyone recommend some good sites for Review material? I used the MS Press book to study for this exam.[/b]

deneb829

A 531 score is a back to (or just "to") basics score. You shouldn't be reviewing anything. Forget the exams and certification and just focus on learning Server 2003. Unless you just had a really bad day, you are a long way from needing review material and should be looking for learning material.

Take that Microsoft book, an evaluation copy of Windows 2003 server, and (if you don't have a dedicated computer) a free copy of virtual PC from Microsoft. Build a lab and go through every single exercise in the book while at the same time study the theories and application behind what you are doing hands on. When you are done with the Microsoft book, buy another study book on Server 2003 (a nice big one) and do the exact same thing again. That should take you around two months if you put several hours a week into it. Then you will be ready for review material. Just studying from review material and not having a solid grasp of the material is only going to lead to major frustration.

Take your question back here to the forums and let us help you. Also, give us some of your background. What is your current experience and education?

Mishra

Question.

You have a bottleneck and you need to setup performance counters to monitor the server to figure out what where your bottleneck is.

Which 2 counters should you choose?

A. LogicalDisk\% Idle Time
B. PhysicalDisk\% Disk Time
C. PhysicalDisk\Avg. Disk Queue Length
D. Memory\Write Copies/sec
E. Memory\Commit Limit


I choose C and D. You look at queue length to see what Read/Write requests are queuing so you know the Disk is too busy and that is your bottleneck. And D because we have already covered disks, and you should see what kind of writing you are doing to RAM (even though that doesn't cover read).

It isn't A because we need to cover the whole physical disk. You don't want to look at Disk Time because Queue is a better way to view hard drive performance. And the Commit Limit deals with paging.

What do you all think?

Non-Profit Techie

those are the answers i choose. but i havent taken the test yet

Mishra

Any other answers?

Mishra

No answer is right... What do you all think? The answer it thinks that it is doesn't give you redundancy so it is also incorrect.

Everlife

The highlighted answer makes sense to me. It's just one of those odd Microsoft questions you have to read a few times through.

The OS and application would be stored on Disk 0 and 1 in a mirror set. If one fails, you have the second that will cover the redundancy requirement.

The stripe set of Disk 2 and 3 will cover the quick read time as all temporary files will be written to that set. The question says the original files are stored on the network, so there is no need to have the temporary files that are written to the stripe set covered with any type of redundancy.

VantageUK

What he said.

Makes sense

Mishra

I suppose being a Linux guy as well gives me a disadvantage. Source files to me are the original install files. So it wouldn't matter where those were. The question would make more sense to me if they stated it as "installed files" or just simply "ran the application from a network drive".

Thanks.

Everlife

Yeah Microsoft exams require a whole new way of thinking, the Microsoft way. The key pieces of info in that question are the application and OS need to have fault tolerance. By default, applications within in a Windows environment are normally installed to the OS partition. You can immediately eliminate every single answer that doesn't involve a fault tolerance scheme with the OS disk (which we need to assume is Disk 0.)

That leaves you with three different answers. You can't configure a RAID 5 with only two disks, so you can eliminate that option. Spanned volumes don't provide any type of read/write performance, so the last answer can be eliminated. By process of elimination, the only answer that makes sense is the highlighted answer.

On questions like that, use the elimination technique.