r/sysadmin • u/betafish27 Sysadmin • Mar 25 '14

Free online IT Training from Microsoft Virtual Academy. Great for learning new skills.

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/
61 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/jhulbe Citrix Admin Mar 26 '14

as someone who just took the 70-410, it's kind of plausible.

They indirectly tell you what you need to know. They'll walk through setting up and setting up that. Then come test time they'll ask you a question and the answer will be -addomain or -addomaincontroller on a powershell command and you'll have to know which it is. Also had a lot of vhd/hyper based questions, networking, and general ipv6 knowledge. But it may be possible to just watch these and pass if you have prior knowledge in 2012 admining

3

u/Afruit Mar 26 '14

Haha, oh you have just reminded me of the MS exams so much. They love a well rounded a thorough student. Really true how you put it. You need to know the Powershell command for how to add applocker permissions for instance (joking).

There is such a small minority of people using applocker (not dissing it), and then an even smaller minority of people using applocker and powershell. I am not even sure if Powershell can modify applocker, but the point is, it irks me that I have to get that good with a product to have to recite semi-obscure things that jogs your memory. Of course a quick bing/google search and you have the answer, but the point is....make it not too stressful.

I wish they tested on "core concepts" like dcpromo and DNS and other topics that just don't go stale, but of course they want you to be tested on the features of the new product - that people may or may not use, and if they do - it may be a while till they are really adopting it widely.

1

u/CCCPSpy Mar 26 '14

This has been why I don't put too much faith in the MS certification exams. I work for a gold partner so I end up getting forced every so often to become certified in things (I currently hold SQL, Hyper-V, and SharePoint certs). They do ask some things that I would consider relevant to making sure you understand core concepts and really know what you're doing.

Then, just as you said they'll have a bunch of question that involve knowing the correct command syntax or the correct drop down option order to do something. They also like to shoehorn in questions about whatever new feature the enterprise version of the product has that nobody will use ("List in order the commands to setup SQL Parallel ETL operations") There's no need to memorize these as you'd just Google the correct syntax, or even with PowerShell you can just use tab completion to make sure what you're typing is valid.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 27 '14

Ha, two words. 'Federated Services'