SharePoint 2013 Certifications

RobertKaucher

Is anyone else here currently study for either the MCSD (developer) or MCSE (IT pro) exams?

I'm just starting to get my material and strategy together so I was wondering if anyone already had some suggestions for resources. I'll be starting with the MCSD exams as I already have the 480 and 486 completed and I figure I may as well start with the hardest tests first to get them out of the way.

Then I just have to convince my wife that I need a new motherboard that will support more than 16 GB RAM so I can build a fully load balanced test environment with clustered SQL Server. Of course I get $100 a month Azure credits from MSDN so I might just build it there or using CloudShare.

Any opinions?

RobertKaucher

Wow, so I just did the math and it looks like a virtual environment in Azure with 3 SharePoint Servers (crawl and 2xWFE) with 14 GB of RAM each, 2 SQL Servers for clustering, and an DC with 768 MB RAM running server core will cost under $4.00 US an hour.

So I don't think there is any way at all I could justify a new system considering the MSDN Premium gives you a $100 credit a month.

That is really just insane. Less than $4.00. If I spend 20 hours a week labbing, and there is no way I could do that, it would only cost me around $320 for a month. And I am quite certain work would let me expense the overage. A more realistic amount of time would probably be 10 hours a week. So $160 and I'm sure my boss would have no issues with expensing $60.

That really kind of blows my mind.