Barely, with a 715. I should be careful about which exams
I claim I can pass without studying.
Last Friday I learned that my project for this week was rescheduled for a couple of weeks later. I checked around on Monday to see if anyone needed an extra body this week, but between the Worldwide Partner Conference and the usual round of early July vacations, very few people were around to respond and none needed my particular skillset. I have been meaning to tear down the lab environment on my laptop and rebuild it with Server 2012. Looking around I saw that there was no upgrade path to go from RC to RTM, and with RTM shipping early August I didn't feel like rebuilding my lab twice so soon. So on Tuesday afternoon I decided to take the 659 exam. It was too late to schedule an appointment for Wednesday, and I had some family business that required my attention on Thursday, so Friday morning was the earliest I could sit the exam.
I didn't really need to take the 659. I took the 652 almost exactly 3 years ago and that counted for my MCITP:VA. MS just changed the
Gold Server Platform Competency Requirements to require the 659 in addition to an MCITP:VA or SA for each of the 4 consultants. The 659 can also substitute for the 247 exam as credit towards the
MCSE: Private Cloud. There were those 2 reasons, but I was more excited about trying to pass the exam or short notice with little or no preparation. I did look at the objectives and saw that Remote Desktop Services was on the test, so I read through the RDS chapters in the Mastering Microsoft Virtualization book on Wednesday and called it a day.
Once I started the exam, I thought the SCVMM topics were going to beat me. It's been 2.5 years since I took that test and I have only touched it a couple of times since. It's also been 14 months since I took a live exam - I took the 693 exam for my VA in May 2011 and only the Office 365 beta exams in January 2012 since then - so the exam had a new look and new question types. I especially liked the drag-and-drop to build a PowerShell script questions. Those were so much better than the PoSh syntax questions on the Exchange exams. My lowest section was on Configuring Child Settings while the 3 sections that include SCVMM topics - Managing, HA, and Migrations - were my best scores.
And that should do it for this round of client, server, and application exams. Next will be Server 2012, Windows 8, Exchange 15 and maybe a couple of System Center exams for private cloud requirements.
