Exam 70-740 : Installation, Storage, and Compute with Windows Server 2016 : Exam Tips and Feedback

I sat and passed the above exam today, and as there seems to be a total lack of information on this exam out there (aside from what’s in the exam blueprint), I thought I would pass on the benefit of my experience and offer a few tips for folks out there planning on taking it.

The 70-740 forms part of the three exams needed to fulfil MCSA : Server 2016 (the other two being 70-741 and 70-742) if you don’t already have a 2012 MCSA, which I don’t. The first exam concentrates on installation, storage and compute as you may guess by the title of the post.

The exam itself is 47 questions and the time allotted is 120 minutes. It seems that gone are the days when you got really verbose scenarios and then asked if the equally wordy solutions matched the requirements. The questions today were pretty concise, and that included ones where a scenario was given and potential solutions offered.

If you’ve done any of the recent MCSA exams such as Office 365, I thought the questions were even shorter than that, so perfect for someone like me with the attention span of a gnat.

In terms of the question formats, there are the usual drag and drops (3 from 6, say), drop down complete the PowerShell commands, select a couple of correct answers from 6 or 8 and then the right answer from 6 or 8. The focus of the questions is pretty faithful to the exam blueprint and you should study (amongst others) on the following areas :-

• NLB
• Storage Spaces
• Nano Server installation and customisation
• Product activation models
• Remote PowerShell sessions
• Hyper-V (create VMs, create VHDs, limitations of nested virtualisation)
• Failover Clustering (Shared VHDXs, monitoring, live migration requirements)
• NTFS vs ReFS
• iSCSI
• Storage Replicas
• Containers and Docker commands

The exam took me around 35-40 minutes and I managed to pass with a 796, which was a pleasant surprise as I’d been studying quite piecemeal for the exam and a lot of my answers in the exam itself were educated guesses. As usual, if you aren’t sure, rule out the ones you know can’t be right and then play the percentages after that. Also, a lot of PowerShell answers revolve around a “Get-Something” and “Set-Something” structure, so that may help if you’re not sure.

On now to 70-741 and hopefully I can wrap up the remaining two MCSA exams fairly quickly. Good luck if you’re sitting this one soon. In terms of study resources, I used PluralSight, bought the MS Press Study Guide (use the code MCPEBOOK for 50% off the eBook version) and used a lot of Technet articles and also Hands On Labs to lab stuff I couldn’t quite get my head around.