After a rather busy summer, I figured it was about time I got round to finishing up my MCSE:Private Cloud, by completing the final exam in the track with the 70-246 exam. Unfortunately due to a very busy week since I came back from holiday, I haven’t given myself much time to study for the exam!
At the time of writing there are still no online MOC (Microsoft Official Curriculum) courses on 70-246 (such as the courses you can use with your TechNet subscription), so if you have a manager with a great training budget you can always attend the 10750A: Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012 (5 Days) training course. I have other courses I want my dev budget spent on, so I have chosen to use online resources to study for it instead.
As always, I have summarised my prep materials / study guide below for anyone interested:
- Official Microsoft 70-246 Exam Page
Links to all official source material, exam reqs, etc. Make sure you know and understand all of the skills measured. - Microsoft Virtual Academy Courses – Free!
For a free resource these courses are superb! I used these previously for my 70-659 exam prep, and have done so again this time. If you haven’t done 70-659 and are approaching 70-246 without any Hyper-V knowledge but perhaps some VMware knowledge, then I highly recommend you consider the “Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals – The Platform” and “Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals – Management” courses first. They are based on 2008 R2 but it will cover off the mapping of terminology etc.
Note: there is quite a bit of repetition in the courses, so I will try to highlight as I go, which are the best use of your time (unless of course you’re a rank whore, in which case do them all!). The courses I completed are as follows:- Configuring and deploying Microsoft’s Private Cloud
A good intro to Hyper-V 2012 covering a broad base – expect so spend a good 16 hours watching the 8 videos (allowing for pauses for breaks and note-making). As usual, the inimitable Symon Perriman leads the course, assisted by a selection of other MS technical marketeers.
Be warned, the content in this is very useful, but this was one of the driest MSA courses I have watched to date. At points I did struggle to keep my attention levels up. Try to watch them say one video a night, then spend some time playing with your lab on whichever component you were watching. Trying to watch these in one go will zap your brain!
Note: For some reason this skips the intro video for the jump start course which can be found here, and I recommend you watch first for a general overview:
Private Cloud Jump Start (01): Introduction to the Microsoft Private Cloud with System Center 2012 - What’s New in System Center 2012
This follows the same slide deck as the intro to private cloud course I mentioned above, but with a different presenter. - System Center 2012: Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)
Still a lot of high level technical marketing, but there are some quite useful demos. - System Center 2012 Operations Manager
Very well presented and goes into a decent amount of detail with plenty of demos. - System Center 2012: Orchestrator & Service Manager
Another well presented and more in-depth course. - System Center 2012: Configuration Manager
Review TBC – I did not actually get through this in time before my exam, but plan to revisit it later anyway. - System Center Advisor
Review TBC – I did not actually get through this in time before my exam, but plan to revisit it later anyway. - Introduction to Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud
Do this if you are totally new to cloud concepts, otherwise save your time and look elsewhere.
- Configuring and deploying Microsoft’s Private Cloud
- System Center 2012 Self-Study Guide by Scott Rachui – Recommended!
Quite simply the most in depth, detailed set of study guides I have ever come across! Scott has put in a huge amount of effort to gather all of these resources in one place. Go through as many as you can, but to be honest, you probably wont have time to get through them all!!! - Study Guide by Keith Mayer
Great resource from MS blogger Keith Mayer. To download his guide, you need to use the “Pay with a Tweet” link to get a copy of his free PDF. Totally worth the price! 🙂 - Official MS Virtualisation Blog
If you’re a VMware person, hold onto your hat for some serious politicking, but there is some interesting content if you have time for a browse. - Hyper-V White Papers by Aidan Finn
This site is run by MS MVP Aidan Finn, who has co-authored a load of books on MS products. - Build a Home Lab
I cannot recommend this enough. The best way to learn Hyper-V is to play with it, that way you have seen the ins and outs.
My home lab runs under VMware Workstation 8 on Windows 7 64-bit, with an Intel Core i7 920 and 24GB of RAM.
To get Hyper-V 2008 R2 to run like this you need to do a couple of fixes to your hypervisor VMs when you create them. See Velimir Kojic’s blog postfor more info on this, but the headline points are:- Enable virtualisation of VT-x/EPT. This is the same as you would do for virtualising ESX/ESXi under Workstation 8, allowing nested 64-bit VMs.
- Add the following line to your VMX files:
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = “FALSE”
- More to links and updates to follow over the next week…
Please feel free to submit any worthwhile links to study materials and I will include them above.
Related Posts:
MCTS: 70-246 Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012 Exam Review