MCITP

For a home farm, ESXi on a separate pc. If you can push it, a 200+gig SSD, 16+ gigs of ram, a quad core and another large traditional drive for VM parking and storage will do everything up to the MCIPT Enterprise.

I have a similar rig and will be picking up the SSD, since my current setup (dual 256mb Dell Perc5 Raid cards, Raid 0 on six 10k Raptors, a older 128gig SSD and a raid 5 array with 10k 300gig SAS drives) is lacking in hard-drive power and slowing my farm down plus adding huge single points of failure.

As for your aggressive schedule, its doable. But it will show up on the transcript and it might come up in a interview or at later stages as to how and why you achieved it in that time. A more constant training schedule over a long period of time(now till when you die) is the best idea.

A small 128gig SSD, cheap quad core and 16gigs of ram should be possible for 500. Your not buying a expensive gfx card, fancy case etc. Try the building and upgrading forum for suggestions. Upgrade the storage as you need but it should do you for now.

ESXi is free, the enterprise features which you won't be using are not.

Im in the same boat - spent most of my time maintaining but very little actually starting from the ground up.
Plan is to get Citrix under my belt (work requirement) and then concentrate on MCITP.

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

For a home farm, ESXi on a separate pc. If you can push it, a 200+gig SSD, 16+ gigs of ram, a quad core and another large traditional drive for VM parking and storage will do everything up to the MCIPT Enterprise.

I have a similar rig and will be picking up the SSD, since my current setup (dual 256mb Dell Perc5 Raid cards, Raid 0 on six 10k Raptors, a older 128gig SSD and a raid 5 array with 10k 300gig SAS drives) is lacking in hard-drive power and slowing my farm down plus adding huge single points of failure.

As for your aggressive schedule, its doable. But it will show up on the transcript and it might come up in a interview or at later stages as to how and why you achieved it in that time. A more constant training schedule over a long period of time(now till when you die) is the best idea.

Checkout the specs for my training PC

I got laid off last year and spent six weeks going through the Microsoft MCITP books. I'm working in IT Operations again and wish I had that time to study again it was a blessing. The nice thing about dual booting is I don't need a second machine.

PC make: Alienware
Processor i7 quad core CPU 2.67GHz
Memory: 15GB

Hard drive 1 500GB and Hard drive 2 500GB 7200rpm, RAID 0, SATA II, OS Windows 7 Ultimate

Hard drive 3 7200rpm 1TB (Backup drive)

Hard drive 4 Solid drive 240GB 3.5 inch, OS Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V role installed

Graphics Card Nvidia GeForce GTX 580

phily2002 wrote: »

Sorry to hijack the thread but my questions about MCITP so thought I'd put it here rather than starting a new thread. Anyway I want to do the MCITP, there's a course in Dorset college for 2k, would you recommend this or would I be better off getting books and studying myself. I have A+ and network+ already. cheers Phil

I'd say the home training route, it gets you into good habits for your career in IT. MCITP Enterprise is possible from home training.

Faolchu wrote: »

the advantage is you'll have preconfigured servers etc set up identical to the labs in the manual you'll be given so there will be no need to build a network at home and try configure it from scratch.

I'd have said that was a disadvantage. Starting from scratch is priceless.

Burgo wrote: »

Yeah that definitely sounds like a disadvantage to me, what do you learn from having it all built for you?

that depends on the course i guess, self paced server administration courses would not benifit from preconfigured labs, it would be more advantageous to just have a server and you do all the groups, accounts and policies etc.

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

I'd have said that was a disadvantage. Starting from scratch is priceless.

i meant from the point of view of the books that are supplied when you sign up to the course in dorset college. the 70-640 courseware uses the 6425B or C book which has labs designed with specific groups/accounts in mind so the preconfigured VMs make it easier to do the labs in the courseware in this specific book.

for example the 6425 courseware has labs about setting up user accounts and joining them to multiple groups, applying group policy to one use and not another based on group membership etc the AD setup for these labs has hundreds of user accounts and groups preconfigured. so if you follow this courseware and these labs it will be difficult if you dont have these VMs to go by. all microsoft classroom training courseware is like that to my knowledge. remember that phily2002 was asking about the classes in dorset college and that place provides the MS courseware and those books contain lab that have specific server builds/configs in mind


I guess i should have gone further in my post and said that if he was to self studying then starting from scratch is the best way to go. because you get to build the domain from the ground up, use the various methods of creating groups/accounts etc. also if phily2002's only background is the A+ & Net+ with minimal server admin exposure (an assumption on my part) then i'd recommend getting his hands dirty on a self paced/self build type approach that way he learns from the ground up and gets to have more fun with the servers.

the course in Dorset College covers the 640, 642 and 646 exams i think