70-669 - Windows Server 2008 R2, Desktop Vritualization - An Overview

Since I have 3 months to get this certification done and there are 3 exams that I have to take, I will be dealing with 1 for each month. The first one on the list is the 70-669: TS: Windows 2008 R2, Desktop Virtualization which just from the description is probably going to the one that bores me the most in this process.

From the basic description it covers quite a lot of desktop technologies including Virtual PC and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Looking at the more detailed skills measured, looks like I will be doing knowledge checks on 4 different environments:

• Enterprise Desktop Virtualization Environment
• Presentation Virtualization Environment
• Application Virtualization (App-V) Environment
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Environment

I will further break this areas done in separate posts but before I do that I am going to use this post to quickly go through each of them and make a few notes as to where my knowledge of that area is at.

Deploying and Managing Desktop Virtualization Environment 

• Install and configure Windows Virtual PC
  Basically this seems to be covering installing Virtual PC, creating and managing virtual machines (VMs). I have used Virtual PC in the past when I was looking into virtualization technologies and I am pretty comfortable with using it.
   
• Enable and manage Windows XP mode
  I am not so aware of this mode and therefore will have to cover it in greater details later. A quick search shows the Windows XP mode allows legacy XP applications that do not natively run in Windows 7 to run in Windows 7. It does require a VM to function, but I will look into everything related to Windows XP mode in another post.
   
• Create MED-V infrastructure
• Administrator a MED-V environment
  I will have to look into what MED-V is as this is not something that I have used in the past. At this point in time all I know is the MED-V stands for Microsoft Enterprise Desktop - Virtualization and was develop to aid enterprises to migrate to newer versions of Windows.
   
• Create and deploy virtual desktop images
  While I have done this before in VMware, I have not done this in Hyper-V and will have to look at this in more detail.

Having read through the list of the rest of the tested skills, it has dawned on me that I have either not done any of the list before, or my concept of what they are talking about is different. Just for reference purposes I am listing the different skills that are tested here:

Deploying and Managing a Presentation Virtualization Environment

• Prepare and manage remote applications
• Access published applications
• Configure client settings to access virtualized desktops

Deploying and Managing an Application Virtualization (App-V) Environment

• Prepare virtual application
• Install and configure application virtualization environments
• Manage application virtualization environments

Managing a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Environment

• Configure user state virtualization
• Manage virtual desktops remotely

Graham Burgess

P. S. Would be interested in hearing you comments about any of the skills that will be tested in this exam. There is definitely some interesting technology being deployed.