I just passed 70-659 this morning with 850. Not my best score but given I don't work with Hyper-V every day I'll take it. I started studying for this early December and built a lab at home and one in the office a week before Christmas. My labs are definitely overkill but I really wanted to learn this stuff, not just pass the exam. The test is fair and lines up nicely with the objectives. I didn't find any major surprises other than obscure commands that I haven't seen in my studies. Storage and networking are key areas so make sure you understand features and limitations. VMM is also an important area. I'm glad I decided to add the Mastering SCVMM book to my resources. It definitely paid off.
I may entertain going for the VA cert as the other thing on my radar is CISSP but just don't have the time right now. We'll see.
Resources:
- Reviewed all TE posts regarding 70-659, started here:
http://www.techexams.net/forums/virtualization/51260-70-669-resources.html
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Amazon.com: Mastering Microsoft Virtualization (9780470449585): Tim Cerling, Jeffrey Buller: Books
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Amazon.com: Mastering Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (9780470463321): Michael Michael, Hector Linares: Books
- Courses 10936 through 10940 (free for MS registered partners)
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Aidan Finn, MVP
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Exam 70-659: TS: Windows Server 2008 R2, Server Virtualization
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Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides for Virtualization
Home Lab:
- Shuttle SH67H3: i7-2600, 16GB RAM, 1 TB SATA, 120GB SSD
- Freenas 8 on an old IBM x336
- Openfiler on old IBM x306
- ESXi 4.1 on an old HP D7600
Work Lab:
- 4 HP DL360 G5: 2 with 2008 R2 with Hyper-V role, one with Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, and one with ESXi 4.0
- NetApp FAS2040 for iSCSI, CSV, etc.
