Lost

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Hi all,

Hoping to get some pearls of wisdom on starting off for MCSA.

I've done A+, N+ and MCDST.

I'm now looking to buy some self-study books to do the 70-270.

My issue is that these labs threads are confusing me. It would be nice to have a VMware lab, but how much would this cost. Do I need to buy licenses for the virtual machines :-S

I currently have an old P4 2.3Ghz Dell with 756mb of RAM but no hard-drive & A socket 775 3.46Ghz, 2GB RAM machine. I'd prefer not to use both as I have only got 1 monitor, 1 k'board, 1 mouse and limited space.

Has anyone got any suggestions I'm looking at getting the 70-270 MS Press book, not sure whether to get the MCSA server 2003 set at the same time, or how to go about this one, doesn't seem to be as easy as the others lol.

Thanks,

Phil

 

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Hi Lev,
You could buy VMWare for $189 or use Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 which is free. I personally use VMWare workstation and find it an excellent piece of kit. As for licenses for the OS'es on the virtual machines, you can sometimes get trial 180 day versions of server 2003 in the back of Microsoft press books, or by downloading from MS's website or you could buy a Technet Plus Direct sub for £188 + vat which gives you a years access to most of MS's stuff.

HTH
NB

 

You can download VMware Server for free -

Install it on the more powerfull machine and run 2 - 3 vmwares on it.
Then install the vmware client on your personal machine - you can then connect remotely to the VMware sessions on the higher end box.

You can also run trial versions of software/s needed - its worth having a Google at least - you never know what it could turn up ;)

Good luck with your studies!

 

Take that higher spec machine and go get yourself a nice large HDD - the bigger the better and then all the software the guys have mentioned! Another point is if you want to put two smaller HDD's into the two machines you could always control them using a KVM switch and a switch linking the two up then you can use them both for virtual machines like i did.

 

OK so seems simple enough. I've got a 320GB HDD in my main PC. So assuming this will do.

I can get a copy of VMware w/station and server so thats another job done.

Do I just buy the MS-Press book for 70-270 or am I going to need the server copies as well in order to set up my lab :-\

Sorry about all the questions, I've got limited capacity on my credit card so trying to blitz and balance everything at once.

 

there is a fair overlap with 270 and 290, so you will be covering 290 topics when doing the server stuff.

I used the MS press books, e-learning, transcender and virtual machines for mine.

Good luck. Simon