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.

While most of the time you are going to be installing the System Center Virtual Machine Machine 2012 console on a domain joined machine, I had a requirement to install the console on a non-domain joined machine. You can’t do this via the regular VMM setup as the installer does a check for domain membership as a pre-req and there is no way around this.

So this is how I got it working:

• Enable the ‘.NET Framework 3.5.1′ feature (pre-req as per http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg610640.aspx)
• Set PowerShell execution policy to Unrestricted (set-executionpolicy unrestricted)
• Browse to the amd64\Setup\msi\Client folder from the VMM 2012 media and run AdminConsole.msi

You should now have a working VMM 2012 console on your non-domain machine.