It Begins!!! My Journey to MCITP:EA, Messaging, and CCNA

Claymoore

You should be fine without a lab, considering all of your past experience.

I recommend purchasing a practice test from a reputable vendor like Transcender. Part of your exam prep needs to be prepping for the exam format since these will be your first certifications. Don't get too wrapped up in your score by taking the same practice exam multiple times to get into the 900s. Practice exams have a limited use as a study tool, but being familiar with the question formats and language structure will be more help to you than the assessment function of the practice test.

cknapp78

One last question here guys...just saw this online and thankfully old man lives near a tigerdirect store and said he would pick it up for my birthday...woohoo! Let me know if you think this would work....

HP ENVY H8-1445 Desktop PC - AMD Eight-Core FX-8120 3.10GHz, 12GB DDR3, 2TB HDD, 16GB SSD, DVDRW, 1GB AMD Radeon HD 7450, Windows 8 64-bit, Keyboard & Mouse, (H4A24AA#ABA) at TigerDirect.com

Thanks,

Corey

Asif Dasl

I'd look for something else. According to the reviews on the HP website, the computer does not have AMD-V processor extensions. According to the review by "azaqiel" (who says he's an advanced user BTW) the extensions were disabled by HP. Now you usually can set them to enabled in the BIOS but it's possible HP could have disabled it in the BIOS entirely. You would need to check that out in the store.

The reason it matters is you won't be able to run 64-Bit operating systems like Server 2012 or even Linux for that matter in VirtualBox or VMware Workstation. You would have to wipe the PC and load Server 2012 in order to learn it, therefore not the best user experience in the world. And you wouldn't have a client OS to log in to the server OS either so it's not a great PC for learning without those extensions.

SilverGenius

I was thinking of getting one of these little guys, they seem quite nice. Maybe it would work for you as well?
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 1 | tekhead.org

Tremiata

I currently use an ML110G6 with 16GB ram and I am running about 8vms. The newer ML110G7 can run 32GB ram according to reviews on the egg.

discount81

I was in a similar boat to you, had not studied since MCSE NT4 but had been working.

I finished the MCITP in about 4 months, it's not too difficult but there is probably a few things you rarely/never deal with so you need to learn them, but there is an awful lot of subjects you can skim or skip altogether. (I'm sure you don't need to know how to do file/print sharing, auditing, DNS, DHCP etc)

I purchased parts on Newegg when they were on special, cost me around $800, I used an AMD quad core CPU, 32GB ram and I had a NAS box to store the VMs.
I've had around 15 VM's running at once, not the best performance but doable.