70-247 is another of the Private Cloud certification series. The full exam name is Private Cloud Configuration and Deployment with System Center 2012. This exam precedes the 70-246 exam in the cloud certification pathway.
Candidates can register and take this exam from the end of June 2012 onwards. As usual, it's available from worldwide Prometric testing centers.
At this stage it's not clear what the full certification name for the Private Cloud actually is. However, Microsoft have clarified which exams are required to earn the certification. 70-247 makes up the middle of the certification path as shown below:
Private Cloud Certification – Which exams you need to pass
- 3 x MCTS (70-640, 70-642, 70-643)
- 70-247
- 70-246
Requirements
As with the other Private Cloud certifications, you should have experience using System Center 2012 products. In particular, you should know how to install and configure a private cloud solution. Just like the 70-246 exam, candidates need to have core Windows Server and Active Directory experience with knowledge of security, high availability, fault tolerance and networking. A little experience of Microsoft SQL Server and PowerShell are also bonus skills but these can easily be learnt before you take the exam.
Questions and Skills Measured
The following high level areas are assessed (iIf you would like to know the full exam topics, visit the Microsoft learning website).
- Design and Deploy System Center
- Configure System Center Infrastructure
- Configure the Fabric
- Configure System Center Integration
- Configure and Deploy Virtual Machines and Services
We recommend that you study each of the System Center 2012 features. Get used to the dashboards, configuration options and basically play around with everything even if you don't in your day to day job.