Recently, both Microsoft and VMWare had traveling shows highlighting their respective virtualization technologies, and I had the pleasure of attending both of these shows.

One of the gimmes of the Microsoft show was online training and an exam voucher for Microsoft’s new virtualization exam, 70-652.   I’m familiar with virtualization as are most IT professionals these days but not exactly with Hyper-V itself.  I set up a lab with a spare SATA drive, collection of software DVDs, and some of my favorite virtual machines, and got to work.  Of the three Microsoft exams I have sat for, this was the one I was least familiar with, so I had some work to do.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s target market for its virtualization solutions is the enterprise and the exam certainly reflects that.  If I didn’t get the voucher I probably wouldn’tve tried for the exam since most of the material is not applicable to my shop.

The exam should perhaps be called the SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) exam, as that is a strong element of the test.   Fortunately, it’s not hard to learn provided you have Microsoft sysadmin experience.  Lukas Beeler has some good advice for taking the exam.

I’m not sure how SATV could use virtualization.  We can run other Windows instances on an SBS box, but our real need is for another physical box;  we had an extra Windows 2003 server on an old Dell box until it died;  a top priority is to upgrade to SBS 2008 on a new machine so the existing machine can be repurposed as a backup.

But we could run non-Windows virtual machines.  We need a new server monitoring solution and one I'm reviewing is GroundWork.  That is a CentOS-based self-contained system that can run on a physical machine, or just as easily in a virtual machine.  That’s where SATV can use virtualization.

I passed the test, anyway: