Today I took and passed the 70-247: “Configuring and Deploying a Private Cloud with System Center 2012″ exam as part of my track to obtain the MCSE: Private Cloud certification.

I found the exam reasonably challenging. The exam focused mainly on VMM & App Controller, a fair bit of DPM, SCSM & SCOM and a little bit of App-V and SCORC.

There is an MVP who has broken down his experience of the exam - http://blog.scsmfaq.ch/2012/07/06/private-cloud-exam-70-247-my-experience/ - I would agree  with the breakdown however my exam was 62 questions and included 2 large case studies.

I’d recommend a very good understanding and experience with VMM & App Controller, and at least a good logical understanding of the remaining technologies before sitting this exam.

For many years I’ve had to scour the interwebs to find out if hardware virtualization is supported by Mircosoft for a particular product.

I’m not sure how long it has been around but I’ve finally found the Windows Server Catalog site which will simply tell you if it is supported or not:

http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvpwizard.htm

For example I can easily see that SCCM 2007 SP2 on VMWare ESX 3.5 Update 5 with Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 as the guest OS is SUPPORTED!

So simple and so overdue!
 
 

I’ve recently been using the Microsoft Application Virtualization Sequencer 4.6 (aka App-V 4.6) and come across an interesting default setting that ended up being the reason for many of our sequencing problems. The symptom was that sequenced applications run in the virtual ‘bubble’ would not save preference settings or maintain any type of settings from the previous session (eg if the application was open, a few settings changed, closed and then reopened, all settings would be back to default).

The culprit ending up being the ‘Enforce Security Descriptors’ checkbox on the Deployment tab during sequencing – this is turned on by default.

The solution was to UNTICK this box before saving your project (aka compiling). In effect, this is actually giving the security object ‘Everyone’ NTFS ‘Full Control’ on the Q:\%APPDIR% directory (with Q:\%APPDIR% being the sequencing directory you are using based on a name that meets the 8.3 Naming Convention) inside your virtual ‘bubble’. This is enough to allow the user privledge to save application settings into the virtual application path and therefore the settings are maintained when the application is closed and re-opened.

For a more detailed article on ‘Using the “Security Descriptors” within the App-V 4.5 Sequencer’, see http://www.softgridblog.com/?p=105

While on the topic of App-V and since there have been many new terms introduced, there is an excellent Application Virtualization Glossary located on Technet here - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc843850.aspx