This is the one of my Preparing for Certification series of experience blogs. One of the fortunate things of working in consulting and subsequently moving into a role where I am assisting others to prepare for consulting themselves is the opportunity to really build my own experience with preparing for and completing certification exams to accredit my skills, the work that I do, and to build credibility with the folks that I am teaching. As such, I have taken some time to put together my thoughts about my experiences as I have recently [in the past 2 years] completed various credentials.
Please understand that this is intended as a preparation material, to provide targeted resources to help you prepare for the exam. NOT to help you pass the exam. You do that. You need to make sure that you budget an appropriate amount of time to prepare to sit an exam.
Please understand that these are just observations based off of just my own experience with each of the tests. This information is mostly just my observation of the strength of certain items which are on the Microsoft Objectives for the exam and your perception as a unique professional may vary depending on your own strengths. My difficulty scale is as follows:
Easier <-Easy—Moderately Easy—Moderate—Moderately Difficult—Difficult-> Harder
70-649 TS: Upgrade to Windows Server 2008
Moderately Difficult – Q&A – In much the same vein as the upgrade exams for the Windows Server 2000 to 2003 transition, the Windows Server 2008 upgrade exam is a broad based exam that, while not particularly difficult on an item by item basis, presents a challenge to candidates solely on the broad base of knowledge the individual needs to be familiar with. In my experience taking this exam in beta and in production, probably 30% of the content you should be able to pass based on up-to-date experience with Windows Server 2003 SP2 implementation and troubleshooting.
This exam is actually presented in a different manner than most exams I am familiar with in the Microsoft track, opting for fully divided 3 sections rather than a number of questions from different content domains in a single, unified exam. The three sections cover the primary content domains that Microsoft has targeted on the exam page and outlined for the MCSE-to-MCTS upgrade path, aligning with WS2008 Active Directory, WS2008 Network Infrastructure, and WS2003 Application Infrastructure.
A candidate needs to be highly familiar with the Active Directory Certificate Services interaction with Active directory (revocation list publishing, and enterprise CA pre-requisites spring to mind). Also important to a testing candidate are the specifics of working with AD LDS partitions, controlling LDS replication throughout global catalogs, and understanding the scope of schema modifications. As to the directory services themselves underlying these add on services, a solid understanding of backup and recovery for automatic and manual backups as well as how to restore system state information and authoritatively restore a database to correct information loss.
Focusing on Network Infrastructure requires only the lightest review of networking concepts. Ensure that given a super-netted IP block you can distribute the IP addresses into smaller subnets according to a given set of host counts and also that you can adequately choose an appropriate IPv6 address for a given network size and communication need. At a higher level, you need to be familiar with the very basic concepts involved in WSUS architecture and accessibility. Also important are basics of the infrastructure services involved in remote access (particularly when dealing with wireless hosts), DNS, and DHCP services. On top of all of these subjects, a candidate needs to be familiar with the basic mechanics of NPS and how to implement health policies to achieve a specified security policy.
The true heart of the exam is Application Infrastructure, driven home to the candidate by more complex scenarios that an individual will need to be able to logically “parse”, understand the specifics and underlying mechanics, and determine an appropriate configuration path for the situation. It is important to know the terminal services relationships in the 2008 infrastructure, how to publish and load balance terminal servers, how to use ISA to publish terminal services, as well as methods to make applications available through a gateway and publish to a client. Also make sure that before you do your final review to sit the exam, you are VERY comfortable and thoroughly versed in the features and administration of the new IIS 7.0.
A large number of changes are embodied in the IIS release for Windows Server 2008 and, as one might expect, it receives a proportional level of coverage on the exams. Know most of the major command line utilities for administering IIS. You don’t need to come up with full command lines on the fly but you do need to know what they do, what they can do, and what the structure of their arguments are so are familiar with the environment in which a tool needs to be applied.
As far as difficulty is concerned, I really would not kill one’s self over preparing for the exam as if you have worked with the 2003 based server products a pretty good amount, you are already in decent position. Install the product, work with IIS, and look at some of the installation features. Ensure that you are familiar with the basics of administering AD DS, AD CS, and AD LDS environments. Spend the bulk of your review time with the Application Infrastructure portions of Windows Server 2008 concentrating on the new mechanics of the revamped IIS and Terminal Services roles. Take the 70-620 exam before this one, and then you should be really close to prepared. I would estimate 4-6 days of full time preparation, about 7-9 evenings of a couple hours a piece to fully prepare.
Exam Resources
- Microsoft TechNet Virtual Labs
Practice Exams
As I have mentioned in the past, I personally also feel that it is extremely important for exam candidates to use practice tests to prepare for the exam. In the training kit, linked above there is a self preparation suite from Microsoft with a limited base of preparation questions. In addition, preparation tests are available from MeasureUp and Transcender.
MeasureUp - At the time of this writer, no practice test available.
Transcender - 70-649 Exam Preparation Practice Test