need confirmation

g.ranger

is it true that, when you posses A+,N+,server+,security+ you are equivalant to MCSA? cuz a friend of mine told me that.how true is it?

janmike

That's a matter of opinion only.

CompTIA certs are not vendor specific, although they do lean heavily on M$ OSs because those are the ones that are most prevalent.

My studies in MCSA do not indicate that anything that M$ does is very "CompTIAish". For instance, A+ is considered an entry-level PC technician cert, Network+ is condidered to present the knowledge of someone who has 12 to 18 months of Networking experience, Server+ is an advanced certficate concering mostly server security, maintenance, server/storage redundancy, etc. Server plus has been called "Advanced A+".

Some things that you know from studying for CompTIA certs and working in these areas do show up in M$ studies and help in understanding them. However, MCSA studies involve a great depth of study into the working of M$ OSs and most of what you will study in CompTIA exams is rather superficial when compared to that depth.

Also, looking farther in to actual systems administration, it should be noted that someone who is Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator(MCSA) should not be expected to readily become a UNIX system admin or VMS admin or Novell Admin. These are 3 other much different Network OSs.

If someone held these CompTIA certs and had 3 or 4 years of experience in dealing with M$ OSs, he might feel as though he were equivalent to MCSA--he might be. But, just holding the CompTIA certs alone is by no means an equivalent.

Hope this helps.

RussS

janmike is totally on the mark there.

If I was to add anything, I would say the things that really differentiate between them are the ones with all of the fancy acronyms - PXE - RIS - RIPrep - SYSPrep & stuff like that. I do also think that Net+ and Server+ do not quite go into the depths of Active Directory etc that is required to be a MCSA.