Author: rlevchenko

Passed 70-347 Exam: Enabling Office 365 Services

I’ve just passed the last required 70-347 exam by the MCSA:Office 365 certification path .

mcsa office 365 certification path

This exam is absolutely different from 70-346 and dives more deeply into Exchange Online (50%), Sharepoint Online (15%), Skype For Business Online (30%) and 5% miscellaneous (onedrive for business, yammer, office 365 plans, licenses and etc) . It’s an approximate distribution of figures based only on my experience.

One fact: Microsoft does a huge work making exams more and more complicated. It means you should pay more time and attention during preparation.

There are 54 questions in total and a lot of drag-and-drops questions and 80% PowerShell inside. Forget “click, click” times . If you are not familiar and don’t work constantly with PowerShell it’s very difficult and sometimes impossible to pass exams (btw, Second Shot is ending on 01/12/2016)

I published study guide for 70-346 exam some weeks ago and now I’m going to complete this pack of guides by adding guide for 70-347.

Thank you for reading and happy holidays!

exam results 70-347 office 365

Azure Stack: Hardware Requirements

In this year’s Ignite Conference Mark Russinovich, Jeffrey Snover and Jeremy Winter spoke about how to bring Azure to your datacenter and discussed platform vision and strategy . I’d recommend to watch entire video on the channel9 .

Microsoft has been working hard since that conference and yesterday Jeffrey Snover shared hardware requirements for Azure Stack Preview (check out the video and tables below).

azure_stack_hardware_requirements

Storage considerations
Data disk drive configuration: All data drives must be of the same type (SAS or SATA) and capacity.  If SAS disk drives are used, the disk drives must be attached via a single path (no MPIO, multi-path support is provided)
HBA configuration options:

  1.  (Preferred) Simple HBA
  2. RAID HBA – Adapter must be configured in “pass through” mode
  3. RAID HBA – Disks should be configured as Single-Disk, RAID-0
Supported bus and media type combinations

  • SATA HDD
  • SAS HDD
  • RAID HDD
  • RAID SSD (If the media type is unspecified/unknown*)
  • SATA SSD + SATA HDD**
  • SAS SSD + SAS HDD**

* RAID controllers without pass-through capability can’t recognize the media type. Such controllers will mark both HDD and SSD as Unspecified. In that case, the SSD will be used as persistent storage instead of caching devices. Therefore, you can deploy the Microsoft Azure Stack POC on those SSDs.

** For tiered storage, you must have at least 3 HDDs.
Example HBAs: LSI 9207-8i, LSI-9300-8i, or LSI-9265-8i in pass-through mode

Recommended SKUs : Dell PE R630 and HPE  DL360 G9

Links:

Azure Stack review on Microsoft site

Microsoft brings the Next Generation of Hybrid Cloud – Azure to Your Datacenter

Announcing the Microsoft Azure Stack