Month: December 2022

How to Pass the AZ-305 Exam: Resources and Tips

Are you preparing for the AZ-305 exam and looking for helpful resources to help you pass? As someone who recently passed the exam, I want to share some tips and tools that I found invaluable.

Free Microsoft Resources

Microsoft offers several free resources that are useful for preparing for the AZ-305 exam. The Microsoft Learn portal has a vast array of modules to browse through and is especially helpful if you need help with specific concepts. You can also find lab material on GitHub and a study guide that outlines the topics you need to fully understand to pass the exam.

John Savill’s Technical Training on YouTube

John Savill’s videos on YouTube are a fantastic resource for learning and understanding the concepts needed for the AZ-305 exam. Specifically, his AZ-305 playlist and the AZ-305 study cram video are crucial for better understanding the material.

Playing Around in the Azure Environment

One of the best ways to learn is by doing. Create a VM, resource group, and peer a network in the Azure environment. This hands-on experience will help you understand how different services interact with each other.

Using the Official Practice Test from MeasureUp

Once you feel confident that you’ve mastered the concepts, take the official practice test from MeasureUp to get a feel for the type of questions you can expect to see on the exam. This will help you solidify your understanding and identify any gaps in your knowledge.

Conclusion

By using these resources and tips, I was able to pass the AZ-305 exam, and I hope that they can be of service to you as well. Good luck with your exam preparation!

How to Pass the Azure AZ-104 Exam: Essential Resources and Tips

Are you preparing for the AZ-104 exam? Here are some essential tips and resources to help you pass the exam with confidence.

When I took the Azure AZ-104 exam in August, I was able to pass confidently because I used the following resources. I hope that if you’re studying for the exam, you find the same resources helpful.

Exam Ref AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator

I actually bought and read the physical copy of the exam reference guide from Microsoft. I took it with me everywhere for about a month. Anytime I had to wait for anything, I started reading the book. This helped me build a framework for understanding the various concept the exam covers.

Playing Around in the Azure Environment

I cannot overstate how important it is to actually play around in Azure. Create a VM. Create a resource group. Peer a network. All of these things were very important for me to understand how the different services interact.

John Savill’s Technical Training on YouTube

John Savill’s AZ-104 playlist and study cram video were very instrumental in helping me pull all the concepts together. It is amazing that all his content is available on YouTube for free.

Using Tutorials Dojo Practice Exams

The Tutorials Dojo practice exams helped me bring all the concepts together. The questions were similar in concept to what was in the exam, but crucially, they were not brain dumps. The reason I like practice exams is that I learn to think a little more critically about scenarios that I may experience in real life.

Conclusion

These tools helped me study for and pass the exam. I hope that they help you along in your Azure certification journey.

Common Issues Using Azure Migrate

I have been running a VMware home lab with an old Dell PowerEdge R720 with ESXi 7.0.2 installed. I have been running Azure for backups and Key Vault to protect secrets, but now I want to migrate one of my vSphere on-prem VMs. Through this process, I ran into a few issues and “gotchas” that may affect other users. Below is my list of potential issues you may face and how to resolve them.

A Note About Whether or Not to Use the Migration Appliance

I started out choosing to use the migration appliance. I downloaded the OVA and installed it in my lab environment. This initially turned out to be a huge hog of resources without any real benefit for my small lab environment. For that reason, when my project would not allow me to add the migration tool and I had to create a new project, I decided to go with the PowerShell script install on an existing server. If you decide to do the same, remember that you must use a Windows Server OS.

Issue 1: Azure Migration Project Tool Will Not Add to Your Dashboard

This was a random issue. Your Azure Migrate project has access to the free assessment tool and the free migration tool. A functioning project should look like the image below.

A functioning project with the migration tool added

But the first interaction of my project would not allow me to add that tool. I searched the message boards and could not find a solution to my problem. So, I did the next best thing and started a new project.

Issue 2: The x86 version of VC++ Redist 2019 may cause the gateway service to fail

This issue is specific to using the PowerShell version instead of the virtual appliance. This was a problem for me because I had both the x86 and x64 versions of VC++ Redist 2019 installed on my Server VM as shown below.

I searched for the problem on the internet and found this post in Microsoft’s forum. The advice given was to uninstall both versions, but in my case, that just caused another issue. The solution that worked best for me was to only uninstall the x86 version. Once done, the installation was completed successfully.

Issue 3: Insufficient Cores Available in the Subscription (During the migration prechecks)

I worked my way through all the other issues and then ran into this one.

I had enough cores available in the normal compute SKUs, so this one confused me a bit. The issue, in this case, is that I did an assessment, and used the assessment settings to determine the compute SKU I was going to use but did not properly modify the settings in my assessment. Once I removed reserved instances from my assessment and recalculated the assessment, I got a normal compute SKU and was able to complete my migration successfully.

Conclusion

While the Azure Migrate tool may not be as easy to use as some of the paid tools, it can be very useful if you are cost-constrained.

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