Well, after a lot of studying and one prev
ious failed attempt I’ve passed my MCSA Server 2012 exam. As i also had the MCSA server 2003 from a few years ago I was able to use the upgrade exam 70-417 (which quizzes you on Question’s taken from the 70-410, 70-411 & 70-412).
As mentioned previously I will below put up a list of some of the resources I found while studying which might be useful for anyone wishing to do the MCSA exam.
Videos:
I am quite lucky as the company I work for has a corporate account on CBT Nuggets so I was able to get access to all the CBT Nuggets videos in this series. I always find the CBT Nuggets videos very well presented and concepts really well explained.
https://www.cbtnuggets.com/certification-playlist/microsoft/56445
Books:
One personal criticism / issue I have had in the past with video learning (not just CBT Nuggets above) is that more often than not they explain the concept and some of the specifics of a topic but I sometimes find that some of the fine detailed knowledge that you are expected to have for the exams is missing / not very clear. To get past this I tried a couple of books but I found that the Official Microsoft Exam Books were actually really good.
https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/browse/certification-training/server-certifications
Labs:
Like alot of people I find that I learn best with hands on experience, I found that an old machine with a 16GB of RAM and VmWare Workstation / Virtual Box was more than enough to allow me to build a handful of servers including Domain Controllers to allow to test this.
Given this however I found a very valuable resource that allowed me to access when I wanted to quickly test something or get a hands on experience of something that I couldn’t build using local machine. Microsoft provide TechNet Virtual Labs, these are labs which can be accessed from a web browser and spins up a number of Virtual Machines pre-built to allow to test, they also come with an exercise book which steps you through configuring / building certain pieces of technology:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/virtuallabs
A General Perpose Lab i Used a number of times, comes with a Domain Controller a Server and a Client, I used this quite a bit for testing Group Policy and anything Client – Server:
https://vlabs.holsystems.com/vlabs/technet?eng=VLabs&auth=none&src=vlabs&altadd=true&labid=20439&lod=true
One area I couldn’t build using Virtualisation on my local machine was Hyper-V, the below lab was very useful for this:
https://vlabs.holsystems.com/vlabs/technet?eng=VLabs&auth=none&src=vlabs&altadd=true&labid=20429&lod=true
