83-640

Passed with 966 today. I spent less than a week studying but have years of experience administering Windows servers, so all i did was a very quick skim over topics I knew well and spent a bit more time on ones I didn't, namely Federation service, certificate services, and AD LDS.

The exam itself went fairly smoothly. I like the format. I think it's great that they've reached the point where we can be tested on real machines instead of crappy simulators. I had a snafu with my lab though. When I was on the last question of my second lab, I lost connection to the VM. When the connection came back, the mouse worked, but I couldn't type anything. My first Lab had only one VM in the topology. The second lab had 2. It was fortunate this happened during the second lab because the solution was clicking over to the other VM and then back to the VM i was working on. If there had only been one, I don't know how we would have fixed it.

I don't want to violate NDA, but I found all the questions very straightforward. There were no surprises. I finished the multiple choice section in 30 minutes. Overall, I think they give you way too much time. I finished in under 2 hours. There is absolutely NO time pressure, unlike the cisco exams. ICND2 is significantly harder, and BSCI harder still. By the time I finished my BSCI i had less than a minute left on the clock and I had prepared well.

To illustrate, I finished the 10 tasks for my first lab in under 15 minutes. They were all super-easy one or two operation tasks. The second lab took more time b/c of the problem I had and because the last task had me stuck. I knew what I was supposed to do but just couldn't get it to work how I thought it should. I can't say more but I submitted a comment to MS on the task. There was also one task that was very poorly worded and so it was a bit confusing until i figured out what they meant. I don't think it had been error-checked and I submitted a comment on that one too.

Anyway, this exam had the most new stuff for me of the exams required for the MCITP:SA. The rest should be a cake-walk. Maybe I'll do the extra two exams for the MCITP: EA instead...

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Devilsbane

Congrats on the pass.

earweed

Great score, congrats! All that real world experience helped you.
I only scored 783 on it mostly because I only have experience with servers on my home lab.

ciscog33k

earweed wrote: »

Great score, congrats! All that real world experience helped you.
I only scored 783 on it mostly because I only have experience with servers on my home lab.

Thanks. I actually don't have real-world with 2008 but tons of it with 2003. I never did my MCSE bc I didn't have the time (was doing 50-60hrs/wk at work + full time university) so i had no idea what to expect from the exams.

I have to say though that 2008 is a huge improvement. I love Server Manager. Though most of the tools within it are largely unchanged, it makes day-to-day operations so much more efficient. The event viewer is a huge improvement to. i'm sure bigger shops will still still run all the windows events through a log correlation/normalization engine and do centralized storage, but for the SMB it is a really valuable tool that doesn't complicate the environment too much. And the way they now have ALL logs in the event viewer is really sweet.

Anyway, that's enough MS love for one day. i'm a cisco guy :P

earweed

Another poster here,foxer, had only 2k3 experience and once he did the 83-640 he blazed through the other 3 in like 2 months. 2k8 is basically 2k3 with some new features and server manager to make it easier.

ciscog33k

The CCNP helps too. Makes a lot of topics on 70-642 really easy since i already know ipsec, 802.1x, ipv4/v6 addressing, routing, etc. in a lot more detail than required for the MS exam. The actual configuration of all that stuff is easy.

I'm using cbt nuggets and overall they provide a nice tour of w2k8 features, or even 2k3 features i hadn't used much before.

I'm writing 642 on Tuesday and 646 on Wednesday. I'm about 50% through the videos for 642 now. I listen to them on "fast" mode so that they take less time to watch and I take notes while he's speaking. There's only a couple things i'll really need to lab for this exam so I should be able to start prep for the next exam tomorrow. Gonna setup NAP with my cisco switches and do some ipsec GPO configuration. NAP is the coolest thing added to 2k8 so far imo, well, aside from Server Core and powershell.

earweed

+1 on that. Actually most of the first half of book was review from studying Net+, Sec+, and the Client exam. I can imagine how it must seem remedial for a CCNP who has experience with 2k3. I'm studying NAP right now and yeah it is pretty cool.

ciscog33k

earweed wrote: »

+1 on that. Actually most of the first half of book was review from studying Net+, Sec+, and the Client exam. I can imagine how it must seem remedial for a CCNP who has experience with 2k3. I'm studying NAP right now and yeah it is pretty cool.

DNS, monitoring, and backup are highly redundant with 83-640 as well. I'd recommend to anyone to do that one first.

ciscog33k

Welp, 70-642 is down. Ridiculously easy exam. 40 questions in 90 minutes... Again, no time pressure. I finished with 50 minutes left on the clock. The only question I even had to pause for was a subnet design question where i had to do some calculations. All of the other answers were almost immediately obvious.

I really think MS should lower the amount of time for the exam. Cisco exams have to be done in 90 minutes but you have 10-20 more questions, including two simulations, and a lot of them require calculation or actual thinking through how things work in a topology. The MS exams are very fact-based and you either know the answers or you don't, so the questions don't take much more time than the time it takes to read them.

Anyway, I'm cancelling my 70-646 exam and scheduling 647 instead. I'm gonna go straight for the EA cert instead of SA. Based on how well things have gone so far, I don't expect any problems and I should be able to do it pretty quickly.

earweed

Congrats, I'll be taking it in about 3 weeks. Hopefully I find it as easy as you did, but I doubt it. Your experience with 2k3 and your CCNP probaly helped you a lot, plus more test taking experience.
When are you taking the 70-643?

ciscog33k

Not sure. Next week sometime. Gonna get 647 out of the way on Thursday, which I've already done prep for. 70-620 will be almost a formality so i'll probably do it Friday afternoon, after some very quick review on areas I haven't touched. I have more things I need to go over for 643, so i'll probably do it next week and make full use of the weekend.

After two exams, I'm not really concerned about the difficulty level or not preparing for long enough. Even on things I don't know as well as MS would probably want, like command line configuration of Server Core. The questions on the exam are written in such a way that it's usually possible to immediately eliminate 2 options and then make a pretty easy choice between the last two... I just want to get this done quickly so that I can stick it on my resume and resume my job search.

Earweed, good luck on your 642 exam. It's really not that tough. They don't try to trick you on any of the questions.

Btw, if i haven't plugged CBT nuggets, I should do that. It makes review pretty damned quick if you're the type that can sit in front of a screen for 12 hours at a time (i am). James Conrad really hits the stuff that's important for the exams, including specific command-line stuff. That said, I'm not big on memorizing command syntax for commands I use once in a blue moon, and on the exam itself, as long as you know the main options or things that you can do with a command you'll probably be able to make the right selection most of the time. When you're studying, understand the big concepts. I find that you really don't have to get too hung up on the minutiae like you do on the cisco exams, and it makes studying a lot less painful. Oh and FWIW, I changed my mind and decided to do the vista exam instead of the 7 exam. There's less new features so studying will go faster.

ciscog33k

Just got back from 70-647... This was the first MS exam that I could legitimately call challenging. I still passed with a 912, but for the first time I felt the questions were designed to really test your ability to think about the best way to do something and why instead of just answering questions with fairly obvious answers. Several questions had multiple correct answers, but only one optimal answer, and on a couple of them the choice was VERY marginal. The questions are also very long, if you're not the type that can remember lots of individual bits of information as they relate to the scenario presented, you might have to reread the question a couple times, which hurts you on the clock. The answers to some questions do hinge on one word, so you have to read carefully. I still finished with lots of time on the clock though, and I still think there should be an extra 20 questions on the test for the amount of time they give you. It's still too much imo.

The exam builds heavily on 640, 642, and 643, though most heavily on 640 and 642. If you have lots of experience and understand the topics covered in those other exams, 647 should require little extra preparation. There are a small amount of topics unique to the 647 exam, but they also comprise a small part of the exam. My prep was again CBT Nuggets. I watched the videos one time and that's it. Several videos were mostly repeats of videos in other series and I skipped over them.

I have to say i'm getting a little burned out from the tight schedule i've imposed upon myself for getting this done, but only 2 more to go. The vista exam tomorrow should be easy and then I'll just have to worry about the 643 early next week.

edit: Vista down. super easy test. I got a lot of sims and they're basically free points if you've spent any time with the OS and actually have a clue. Didn't even watch any videos this time. I juts played around with windows mail/fax/meeting/parental and the other little programs you're supposed to know in a VM, since i'd never really touched them before. One more exam to go and then I can go back to working on my cisco certs.

2ndchance

Holy Cow, Cisco. I guess I never imagined anyone could blow past MS exams that easily. Thanks for all the info; I'm sitting for the 640 Tuesday and I'm getting nervous. I've never sat for an MS exam, so I was not sure what to expect.

Agreed on CBT Nuggets. Their Cisco guy is gold. I found the CCNA pretty easy but I have FAR more experience in Cisco than I do MS. Also glad to see someone agree that there are many topics that overlap between 640, 642, 646, and 647.

earweed

There is definite overlap between 640 and 642. I don't know as much about the others yet. Cisco blew through these like they were nothing. I can already tell from what I've read in 70-643 so far that is going to be the most challenging of the first 3 tests in my MCITP:EA track.

ciscog33k

I honestly wasn't expecting the exams to be so trivial. I figured 640 and 642 would be fairly easy for me because i had lots of experience, but I remain surprised how easy the actual questions were. It wasn't until i blew through the first two that I even decided to go the EA route instead of SA. I originally thought that doing 5 exams would require more time than I really wanted to allocate to MS, but as it turns out...

By comparison, for cisco exams i generally put in 3x40-50hr weeks of studying/labbing for each one, and for the BSCI even more (and I failed it the first time). Of course, i had a lot more familiarity with Windows Server than I did with the material on the CCNP exams when I took them, but still, I wasn't expecting... this...

Anyway, I started prepping for the last exam tonight. I formatted my computer to stick 2008 and hyper-v on it. I'm actually really annoyed right now because there's some lame bug that makes it almost unusable with a nvidia gpu and i've wasted too much time on it. i just downloaded some raelly old version of the drivers that are suppose to work so we'll see hwo it goes.. Right now the computer is extremely laggy, RDP sessions drop-out, etc. this is with a quad core and 8gb of ram.

Oh and for you guys that are sitting 640 or 642, and hell 647 too, know DNS inside out. Also, look at the breakdown of the subjects on the ms site. When they list 10 things that total 12% of the exam, they mean it. Just as a general study strategy, don't spend too much time worrying too much about stuff that *might* show up on one question. Also, without going into specifics and breaking NDA, I found that the most complicated subjects in terms of the # of configuration were also the easiest questions on the exams because they really didn't hit you for extreme detail on them. This is my big criticism of the exams in general. Were they cisco exams, I feel there might have been a question that asked you to explain how kerberos works in conjuction with Federation Services that would have required you knowing what the hell was going on with that ticket, but the questions don't hit you with that kind of depth (647 comes a lot closer to it than the others though).

That said, I'm not suggesting under-preparing. If you're new to the material, definitely read the MS books. I'd never recommend doing what i've done to someone that wasn't already very strong with all the topics covered. You don't want to be the ******* with an MCITP: EA that can't explain how replication works.

earweed

I agree. That's why I'm studying and labbing a lot. I'm gonna hit up the technet virtual labs along with what I'm doing on my own home lab. Hopefully I can afford to finish up my new box this month so I can play with Hyper V, if not the technet labs have a lot of Hyper-V labs.
I've heard Hyper-V doesn't play well with high end video cards.

Edit: you may also want to check out some of the technet virtual labs for Server 2k8
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb512925.aspx

ciscog33k

earweed wrote: »

I agree. That's why I'm studying and labbing a lot. I'm gonna hit up the technet virtual labs along with what I'm doing on my own home lab. Hopefully I can afford to finish up my new box this month so I can play with Hyper V, if not the technet labs have a lot of Hyper-V labs.
I've heard Hyper-V doesn't play well with high end video cards.

Edit: you may also want to check out some of the technet virtual labs for Server 2k8
TechNet Virtual Labs: Windows Server 2008

It is true. i'm going to have to stick 7 back on my computer or at least remove hyper-v. Anything related to video is just too laggy. It's too bad because I actually use VMs for work, and speeding things up a bit would have been nice, but I still have to serve my blu-ray collection to my projector from here until i get a new job and can get a dedicated VM server.

Great article explaining the issue:
Understanding High-End Video Performance Issues with Hyper-V - Virtual PC Guy's WebLog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Apparently, if you have i7, you should be fine even with high-end graphics because of some new features in the hardware.

earweed

The box I'm building is i5 but it's just for mainly labbing, no high end graphics stuff. Good article. explains the issue to where even I can understand it.

ciscog33k

Ugh. Took me longer than expected to get through the videos for this one. I made notes on everything and did a lot of labbing. Wasted too much time messing around with installing 2k8 trying to get hyper-v working properly with my stupid video card. exam in 8 horus and haven't slept yet. been drinking coke all night to stay awake but now i'm too wired to sleep. :P

Should be interesting but I have the second shot voucher I can apply if i fail the test. Gonna sleep 3 hours then get up and review notes/play around in VMs.

earweed

Good luck!

2ndchance

Thanks for the additional info. Based upon what you have said, I'm thinking these exams are going to really hit you with plenty of conceptual questions. For example, I understand LDS, RMS, and FS at a conceptual level; I know what purpose they server, but not how they work.

DNS... I work with DNS quite a bit at work, so I'm hoping that I understand it well enough. I've done the DNS labs twice in the past 48 hours and aced all the DNS questions on the practice exam in my Exam Cram book. My weak parts are auditing, CS, restore, proactive monitoring... I've only been active in the server world for 3 months.

I spent a year in the Cisco world before I even touched the exams. Cisco really requires you to know your stuff... I am VERY nervous about tomorrow.

LOL - I took an exam provided by MeasureUp (came with the Exam Cram book). I felt like I was sitting for the CCNA and was accidentally given the CCNA R&S written exam. I felt as if I guessed every other question. I'm never using them again.

For a test lab, I have 2 computers running quad-core CPUs, 4 gigs RAM (yeah - definately need 8 gigs) , dual 512mb video cards, and 8 monitors total. I'm using VMserver 2.0.

Less than 24 hours to go... going hard at CS, auditing, and anything I feel a little weak in. Good luck on the 647!!

ciscog33k

Well, I'm done. I killed the 643 exam on 3 hours of sleep. My weakest area in terms of real experience was IIS, media services, and sharepoint, but it didn't make a difference to my score. I finished in 40 minutes and didn't really have to pause to think for any of the questions.

In terms of exam order, I'm not sure if it's covered elsewhere on the site, but I'd highly recommend doing them in numerical order, so 640, 642, 643 and then 647, for reasons stated in a previous post. 642/643 both reference GPOs a lot, so it's good to learn that stuff early if you're new to it. 643/647 both reference DNS a lot. AD is really the foundation of Windows Server so it should be first. Certificates are prominent on all exams, so it's really good to make sure you understand it well from the beginning by doing 640 first.

In terms of exam difficulty, 70-647 is by far the most difficult. It is, in fact, the only exam of the bunch that I would actually call a real challenge. While the 70-64x exams occasionally had a tricky question, for the most part, they were very straightforward. Generally, even if you don't have a topic totally down cold you should still be able to score over 900 imo.

So now that i'm done with the MCITP: EA, i'll make a couple of general comments, not that MS is going to listen to me, but I feel like making them:

1) There needs to be some real troubleshooting questions on these exams. I mean real troubleshooting, not stuff that could be answered by a beginner systems admin like "you can ping the ip address but not the dns name. What is wrong?" (not a real question but that's the gist of some of them)
2) Provide more marginal answer choices. They need answers that are closer together in terms of probability of being correct for people that guess. Too often I saw answers and I was thinking "how does that even answer the question? it's totally unrelated..."
3) The only exam with sims was the 70-620 (vista) and 83-640. There were 0 sims on the other 2 so-called configuration exams. Pretty lame imo. Also, they need to beef up the complexity of the sims/VMs. For half of them they basically give you the answer in the question by telling you exactly what to do. Ridiculous.
4) Put some time pressure on the exams. Either put more questions in the exam or reduce the amount of time to complete them. Part of the challenge of the cisco exams, even the CCNA, is that you have to be FAST and they give you just enough time to finish if you know what you are doing. MS is FAR too generous.

GosU-TecH

Grats, nicely done.

earweed

Congrats!