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SharePoint 2013 Certifications
RobertKaucher
Member Posts: 4,299 ■■■■■■■■■■
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?
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?
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OptionsRobertKaucher
Member Posts: 4,299 ■■■■■■■■■■
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.