Preparing for Citrix Certification Part 3 of 3

Courtesy - Carl Wester

In Part 2 of this series, you were given my personal observations into preparing for and taking Citrix certification exams. In the final article in this series I will give you some short random thoughts about:

• Why should you get certified?
• How do I study for exams (since I’ve taken so many)?
• How are exams scored?
• What to look for in an exam center.
• My favorite exam centers.
• Dealing with not passing an exam.

Why should you get certified?

Certification is one way to prove you have a basic and specific level of product knowledge. If you work, or plan to work, for a Citrix Partner, certification may be a requirement of your job. Earning CCA certifications is also one way to get a jump on others who may apply for the same position you have applied for. Having your CCA certification can help prove to a potential employer that you have worked and studied to improve your product knowledge.

Not everyone needs to be certified. I doubt that a company would ask Brian Madden if he was certified before he implemented a XenApp farm. There could come a time when your resume and experience level is so impressive that being certified may not matter. Even those with a lot of heavy real world experience still spend a lot of time in the lab keeping current and also working to stay ahead. Until you move into a company management position, there should never be a time when you are not spending time in the lab improving your current and future knowledge and skills.

How do I study for exams?

I take exam preparation very seriously. I have a serious personal flaw that does not like failure and will accept nothing less than a perfect score. If I do not make a perfect score that means there is something I didn’t know or misunderstood about the product I was tested on. It could also mean the test was wrong or there was a flaw in the product documentation! J I do not wish this curse on anyone else.
I start by looking at the Exam Prep Guide to see what kind of test will be given. Will it be what I call a:

• fact based exam
• decision tree based exam
• simulation exam

If there is an online course available I will take it. When I take the online course, I look at the online resources to see what other material I may need to study and I download it. Once I have worked through all the labs in the course, I then start reading every line of all the product documentation (did I tell you I read around 600 words a minute?). While reading the product documentation, I will also build a lab setup to work with the software. I also monitor the Citrix support forums and the relevant zones on Experts Exchange. This allows me to see if I understand the product well enough to maybe answer a question or even to see if I understand what is being discussed.
Once I feel comfortable enough I schedule the exam for at least one week away. That gives me enough time to go back through the online course lab to see if I can do the labs with just the overview directions and not use the step-by-step directions. I will also continue reviewing the admin guide for the product.

The day before the exam, I will review product documentation and then stop studying after lunch. That night, I will waste some time watching TV and go to bed early. Being a morning person, I wake up very early, review the admin guide a final time and then head to the testing center. My favorite testing center just happens to have one of my favorite breakfast places just around the corner. I go eat a breakfast of scrambled eggs and ham, review my notes and go around the corner to the testing center. I sit in my car for a few minutes just to chill out.

When I enter the testing center I make a quick trip to the rest room and then go sign in. The exam proctor will take me to my assigned computer and log me in. After I enter my credentials and verify I am taking the correct exam, I sit for a minute, take a few deep breathes, stretch and then start the exam.

How are exams scored?

Citrix is the only vendor I am aware of that will tell you how they score their certification exams. The Scoring Secrets for Citrix Exams – Divulged is an article written by Citrix employee Alejandra Amador-Garcia that explains the scoring process. Also, some Exam Prep Guides will tell you how an exam is scored. For the Citrix Access Suite 4.0: Design (1Y0-614) exam, the prep guide section 9 is titled Scoring Design Decisions. The Citrix Access Suite 4.0: Build/Test (1Y0-456) Exam Prep Guide also has a section devoted to explaining the scoring and answering process.

What to look for in an exam center

A good exam center will allow you to concentrate on the exam. A bad exam center can hurt your exam experience in that you will spend most of your thought processes complaining about the testing environment.
A good exam center will have:

• Fast computers
• Large monitors
• Clean keyboard
• Clean mouse
• Comfortable room that is neither a meat locker nor sauna
• Good lighting
• Clean rest room that is close by
• QUIET

A bad exam center will be a testing nightmare. Here are some of the things I have come across in what I consider really bad exam centers:

• Computers so slow it can take a minute or longer to move from question to question
• Keyboards so filthy you want to get a penicillin shot after the exam
• The mouse rollers are so coated with filth the pointer barely moves
• Computers with the cases off
• One place was so cold I had to wear a winter coat
• One place had the exam room right next to the training room so I heard every word of the course being taught
• One testing center was on the top floor and the only rest room was on the bottom floor

Once you find a really good exam center, you will not want to test anywhere else.
The exam companies used to send out e-mail surveys to find out about your testing experience. I have not seen a survey in a couple of years. If you think your exam center is a bad center let Citrix Education hear about your bad exam center experience.

My favorite exam centers

I have taken over 100 certification exams in numerous exam centers in seven states (not counting the states of confusion and paranoia that exist during the exam). I have had more worse exam center experiences than good. My top two exam centers are:

#1: DataSchenk, Inc.
611 Potomac Plaza
Suite 101
Smyrna, TN

#2: New Horizons Computer Learning Center
10200 Linn Station Road
Suite 110
Louisville, KY

DataSchenk is my #1 choice because:

• IT IS QUIET — no road noise, no office noise, no training room noise
• Very clean facility — even a private rest room that is clean, well supplied and roomy
• Very friendly staff — never seen the receptionist without a smile and a helpful attitude
• Free water and soft drinks — fridge is full of all kinds of soft drinks including my favorite ginger ale
• Free snacks — for AFTER the exam of course
• Free candy outside the exam room – to help control your blood sugar or nerves
• Fast computer — no delay no matter the type of exam questions
• Large monitor — great for viewing exhibits and other exam features
• Comfortable exam room
• My two favorite breakfast places are just around the corner

Dealing with failing an exam

I know of no one that has not failed at least one exam. I have failed four: one Cisco, one Microsoft and two Citrix exams. The two Citrix exams were 456 and 614 and I failed those miserably the first time. How do you deal with failing an exam after putting so much time, energy and effort into the preparation?

First realize it is just an exam. An exam failure does not mean you failed as a person or an administrator/engineer/architect. As soon as possible following the exam, write down notes to yourself about what was on your exam and what you were not prepared for or what took you completely by surprise. Review the Exam Prep Guide. Did you miss an exam objective or requirement while you were studying?

Note: revealing these notes to other people is very likely a violation of your exam contract. Don’t do it.

Use your notes with the product documentation. Is what you missed covered in the documentation?
Use your notes with your lab. What else can you do in your lab to learn about the questions you missed?

Use your exam score sheet and review your weak areas. Spend more time in the lab going over your weak areas. And then spend more time in your lab.
Remember this about failing an exam: relax, life goes on, you are not a failure.

Parting Thoughts

Certification is a rewarding trip even though at times it is frustrating and painful. I hope your journey rewards you with the titles and money you seek. I hope your quest to improve your product knowledge and skills does not stop once you obtain your certifications.
 

Preparing for Citrix Certification Part 2 of 3

Courtesy - Carl Webster


In Part 1 of this series, you were given the necessary resources to get you started on your Citrix certification journey. In this article, I will give you my personal observations into preparing for and taking Citrix certification exams.

Ready, Set, Go

Now that you studied for your exam, what now? You probably have several questions.

• What is a good way to get ready to take the exam?
• What should you do the day before the exam?
• What should you do the day of the exam?
• What should you do during the exam?
• What are the exams like?

NOTE:
These are my viewpoints, so before I start answering the above questions, I have a few statements. Don’t ask me about any specific exam. Don’t ask me about any exam questions. I will not answer those questions. Don’t tell me about what you saw on an exam or any question you saw on an exam or any question type you saw on an exam. You agree to a Non Disclosure Agreement before you start your exam. Honor that agreement. I do not want to know or need to know what was on your exam and I will not tell you what was on my exam.

What is a good way to get ready to take the exam?

Spend a LOT of time in your lab, read the product documentation, study, learn to think like an exam developer and come up with your own questions and don’t use a brain dump. Know the defaults for installing a product. If installed using all the default options, what menu options are available? What menu options are not available?

Schedule the exam and then commit to a study schedule. I am a morning person so I like to schedule my exams for mornings. The type of exam and the amount of time the exam allows for will affect your scheduling. The 1Y0-456 Build/Test exam allows FOUR hours to take the exam. Most exam centers will not allow that exam to be scheduled after 1PM.

Look at the Exam Prep Guide for the exam you are taking and look at the number of questions on the exam and the amount of time allowed. If your exam has 50 questions to be answered in 70 minutes, that is roughly 1 minute and 20 seconds per question. Do you think you can answer 50 questions in 70 minutes? Or do you think you can complete the 1Y0-456 exam in less than four hours? If you are stressed out about the time and the number of questions, you may not be prepared to take the exam.

Or you could be someone who just stresses out about taking exams. Calm down, take a deep breath and just relax. It is just an exam and life will go on. Just remember, the person who makes a perfect score is just as certified as the person who makes the minimum score. Exam scores are not posted to your exam profile. Exam scores are not available to a potential employer or to your current employer.
Relax while you get ready for your exam.

What should you do the day before the exam?

The day before your exam should be a relaxing day. Go back over the Exam Prep Guide for your exam. Go back over the number of questions, the time allowed, the passing score percentage and the objectives. If you are using the exam prep questions from Citrixxperience.com, you should be able to easily answer the questions and work through any simulations.

Don’t have any caffeine after lunch. Don’t consume too much sugar or carbs after lunch. Before dinner time, go over your study sheets and study guides ONE LAST time for today. Do not study after dinner. Watch some TV, go for a walk and just relax. Go to bed early. Relax. Sleep well. You are ready to knock the exam out of the park and beat my score! J RELAX.

What to do the day of the exam?

Go over your study materials as a review.
Eat a meal without too many carbs. You do not want your blood sugar spiking and then dropping during the exam.

Leave early for the testing center. Better to be early and relaxed than running late and stressed out.
When you arrive at the testing center, go ahead and make sure you can find the correct building or office. Make sure you know where the rest rooms and water fountains are. Some testing centers will have their own private facilities. You may want to go ahead and make a quick trip to the rest room before signing in.

All you need to take into the testing center are your two forms of identification and your vehicle keys. Leave everything else locked up in your vehicle. You may need a jacket or coat as some testing centers are as cold as a meat locker. Just make sure to empty all the pockets of any jacket or coat you bring.

What should you do during the exam?

During the exam — RELAX. You will need to agree to the NDA and you will have the option to sample the various types of exam questions that may be on your exam. i.e. Multiple choice, drag-and-drop, decision tree, full-screen simulation, embedded simulation.
You are free to get up and use the rest room or get a drink during your exam but your time allowed for the exam will keep running.

Do not spend too much time on a question. If you are stuck and the exam allows it, mark the question for review and come back to it. At the end of the exam, the exam review will allow you to see which questions you did not answer and or have marked for review. Each exam is different is what you are allowed to review or change. This is usually described in Section 6 of the Exam Prep Guide. Some exams are designed in a way that going back to review or change an answer is not allowed.

If you think a question is confusing, is marketing B.S. and shouldn’t be on the exam or you disagree with the answers, then you are allowed to make comments. Citrix does review the comments but your comments will not affect your score but do affect the time allowed (i.e the clock is ticking while you are making comments).

After you end the exam, you will know in a short amount of time whether you passed and how well you did. If you were not successful this time, take the score sheet and see what exam sections you need to understand better. You may want to make some notes on what areas in the exam you did not feel sufficiently prepared for. That way you can go back to your lab and brush up on those areas before attempting the exam again.

What are the exams like?

Contrary to what you may believe, certification exams are not designed to trick you or deceive you. Exam questions are designed to determine if you meet the minimum required standards for the goals set for the exam you are taking. If you believe a question is a trick question, make a comment during the exam on that question.

The questions are not designed to trick you but you must pay attention to the wording of the questions. Some of the words to pay attention to are “should”, “could”, “must”, “require/required/requires”. Examples include:

What should the administrator do…
What could the administrator do…
What must the administrator do…
What is the administrator required to do…

In the future, I hope more exams start using live lab simulations. This is where you are given an objective and then dropped into a real live lab environment. This environment is loaded with all the software you are being tested on. This way, you can prove you know your stuff and it will be very difficult to “fake it ‘til you make it”. This will also make it extremely difficult for exams to show up on brain dump sites.

Conclusion.

An exam should not be the conclusion to your learning about a product. You should continue to use your lab to expand your product knowledge. With the many products Citrix now makes available and the products available for Tech Preview, it should take you a long time to run out of products and components to play with in your lab.

I also encourage you to actively participate in the Citrix Support Forums, Brian Madden’s forums and Experts Exchange. Helping others and trying to answer questions are excellent ways to give back to the Citrix community, increase your knowledge and get ready for your next exam.
In the final article in this series, Part 3, I will give you some Random Thoughts about:

• Why get certified?
• How do I study for exams (since I’ve taken so many)?
• How are exams scored?
• What to look for in an exam center
• My favorite exam centers
• Another word on dealing with not passing an exam

 

Preparing for Citrix Certification Part 1 of 3

This article series will give you insight into preparing for and taking certification exams from someone who has successfully taken over 100 of them. Specifically, this Part 1 article will cover preparing for and taking Citrix certification exams. There is no such thing as just reading a book and passing a Citrix certification exam. You need to have some practical experience with Citrix products to pass the certification exams.

There are five things you will need to help prepare for Citrix exams:

1. Computer lab
2. Citrix exam prep guide
3. Citrix product documentation
4. Study material
5. Experience using the product

Computer Lab

A fancy computer lab is not necessary to study for most Citrix exams. A basic laptop with 2GB of RAM will suffice for most of the Administrator level exams. There are several free and commercial virtualization products that can be used:

• XenServer (free)
• VMware Workstation
• VMware ESXi (free)
• VMware Virtual Server (free)
• Microsoft Virtual PC (free)
• Microsoft Virtual Server (free)
• Microsoft Hyper-V (free if you have access to Server 2008 or Server 2008 R2)

There are many other virtualization products to select from. Building a lab environment to help you learn the products should not be hard.

Microsoft and Citrix make products available for trial use. Most Microsoft server products are available for 180-day evaluations. Using the trial version of Server 2008 is just fine for a basic lab setup. Citrix also offers trial licenses for most products after you create a MyCitrix account. Microsoft also offers the Action Pack Subscription plan to give you the use of software that is not limited to 180 days.

Bottom line: there is nothing to keep you from building a simple lab and obtaining the software you need to learn the products and prepare for the exams.

Citrix Exam Prep Guide

In order to understand what you need to know to take an exam, Citrix has available an Exam Prep Guide for every certification exam. Go to http://www.citrixtraining.com/courses/exams/index.cfm and search by Product and or Certification to find the appropriate guide. For example, search for the Product XenApp and click the link for Exam A05. Towards the bottom of the screen under More Info: you will see the A05 Exam Prep Guide. The Guide is a PDF file that contains all the information you need to know about the certification exam. In each guide you will find information on:

• Purpose of the exam (i.e. what skills are being tested)
• The number of questions
• Passing score
• Time limit
• Preparatory recommendations for the exam
• Resources used to develop the exam
• Exam objectives
• Format of questions on the exam (i.e. multiple choice, drag and drop, simulations, etc)
• Practice questions

My recommendation is to concentrate on these three sections:

• Preparatory recommendations for the exam
• Resources used to develop the exam
• Exam objectives

By thoroughly reading and understanding these three sections, you should understand what you need to work on in your lab. Using the A05 Exam Prep Guide as an example, let’s look at these three sections.

Section 3 — Preparatory Recommendations for the Exam

Look at subsection 3.2, Recommended Knowledge and Skills.
Candidates should have the following knowledge and skills prior to taking this exam:

• Basic configuration of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008
• Management of users’ permissions and rights in Microsoft Active Directory 2003
• Intermediate administration skills, including:

o An understanding of protocols (TCP)
o An understanding of firewall concepts
o An understanding of email administration and account creation
o An understanding of Terminal Services policies and profiles
o The ability to create shares and give access to shared folders/files

• Knowledge of basic database concepts

This section gives you the minimum skills that Citrix believes you should have before taking this exam.

Section 5.3 — Resources Used to Develop the Exam

This section will give you a list of materials that Citrix used to come up with exam questions. I recommend reading every resource listed.

Section 5.4 — Exam Objectives

This section gives you an idea of what areas the exam developers will test you on during the exam. Using the resources from Section 5.3, look at the Objectives column and try to come up with your own exam questions as you are reading.

Citrix Product Documentation

Along with the resources list in Section 5.3 of the Exam Prep Guide, you should read all the related product documentation available in the various PDF files or now on eDocs. When taking an exam for XenApp, you should understand the various components that are included with XenApp. For example:

• Publishing applications
• Citrix Policies
• Load Balancing
• Installation Manager
• Application Streaming
• Client software
• Edgesight
• Licensing
• Citrix Secure Gateway
• Web Interface
• Zones
• Data Collectors
• Data Store
• Database types that can be used for the Data Store

All the various components of each Citrix product can be fair game for inclusion on a certification exam. It is your job as an Administrator/Engineer/Architect to know how the various components are used and how they can fit together in an environment. You should be familiar with the documentation for each product and component.

Study Material

There are four main types of study material available to you:

• Citrix Official Courseware
• Third-party unofficial training
• Books
• http://www.citrixxperience.com

Citrix offers both Self-paced Online (SPO) and Instructor-led Training (ILT). I have taken both and prefer ILT if the instructor has real-world experience to pass on in the classroom. Not everyone can afford ILT from a cost or time perspective, so the same courseware is used for the SPO training. The Citrix Education team puts a lot of pride and effort into the official courseware so you will be well served whichever training method you use. If you take an official Citrix course, you can now purchase additional lab time for the course. Citrix Practice Labs are ideal for you Citrix certification preparation.

Brian Madden has available an e-Learning DVD of his 5-day Citrix Presentation Server advanced class. The cost has been reduced to $1,995 and is excellent material.
Shawn Bass does a 5-day class. While I have not been to the class, Shawn Bass is a premier Citrix Expert and a Citrix Technology Professional who is not afraid to tell it like it really is.

The best book ever on any version of Citrix MetaFrame/Presentation Server/XenApp is Brian Madden’s Citrix MetaFrame XP, Advanced Technical Design Guide . While the book may be outdated, the information on the internal workings of what is now XenApp is beyond compare. I am sad to say but most books that cover Citrix products and certification are not worth spending your money on. It would be better to spend your money printing out the product documentation and having it bound at your favorite office supply store.

Citrixxperience.com is the only legitimate web site I know of that offers legal study guides and exam preparation questions and answers. The team at Citrixxperience.com puts a lot of effort into producing materials that can help you on the exam prep trail. Every other web site is an illegal brain dump and using that material can get you in trouble with Citrix and you run the risk of losing your certifications.

Experience Using the Product

Once you have built your lab, know what will be covered on an exam, have the product documentation available and hopefully taken some product training, you are now ready to get the all important hands-on experience.

The best way to learn any product is to use it and try to use as many features as possible. In your lab, learn to install the product, mess it up, fix it, delete files, recover from your accidents and stretch your knowledge of the product. Go to the Citrix support forums, Brian Madden’s forums and or Experts Exchange and try to answer other people’s questions. Even if you can’t answer a question, can you try to recreate the problem and learn something from the issue?

If you use the products from Citrixxperience.com, prove the answers to the questions. Never take an answer as correct. Prove the answer either from the product documentation or from your lab.

Conclusion.

You now have the resources necessary to get started on your Citrix certification journey. In Part 2 of this series, I will give you some personal observations for your certification journey.