UPDATE: There's ONLY 10 DAYS LEFT for the Microsoft Learning "Second Shot" exam voucher offer! Be sure to register and take advantage of this offer prior to May 31st, 2013 ... and use this proven study guide to help you quickly prepare for the MCSA Upgrade Exam on Windows Server 2012!

I’ve assembled all of the relevant content from the Windows Server 2012 “Early Experts” Challenge program into an accelerated Certification Study Guide for IT Professionals targeting Exam 70-417, Upgrading Your Skills to MCSA Windows Server 2012. 

In this article, I’ll provide a summary of this Study Guide along with the information needed to receive your own copy of this Study Guide for FREE!

Are you SharePoint, Exchange or Lync Certified?

In addition to IT Pros previously certified on Windows Server 2008, the MCSA Windows Server 2012 certification is also very relevant for IT Pros focused on SharePoint, Exchange and Lync solutions.  Since SharePoint Server 2013, Exchange Server 2013 and Lync Server 2013 all rely on a strong Windows Server 2012 foundation, you’ll find that the MCSA Windows Server 2012 certification is now a required prerequisite for achieving the new MCSE certifications for SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013 and Lync 2013.

UPDATED: Including the newly released Step-by-Step guides for implementing Windows Azure Virtual Network Site-to-Site VPN and Point-to-Site VPN hybrid networking in the list of linked resources in this study program.

My fellow Technical Evangelists and I have authored a content series that steps through building your very own Private Cloud by leveraging Windows Server 2012, our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012, Windows Azure Infrastructure Services ( IaaS ) and System Center 2012 Service Pack 1.  Week-by-week, we walk through the steps to envision, plan and implement your very own Private Cloud to take your existing data center to the next level and give you the tools and time back in your day for improving IT services and being able to change and shift with your business / IT needs.

In this article, I introduce this series and provide a weekly breakdown of each topic that we've written to help you build your own Private Cloud ...

UPDATE: At the end of this step-by-step article, I've also included a downloadable lab guide and a 130-line PowerShell script for initial provisioning.  The PowerShell script helps to reduce the initial configuration time by automating the provisioning of a new Windows Azure Storage account, Virtual Network and Virtual Machines - after running the script, you'll just need to Remote Desktop into each VM to finish the OS and application-level configuration tasks.  Hope you enjoy!

Now that SharePoint Server 2013 has been released, I frequently get asked about ways in which a SharePoint 2013 lab environment can be easily built for studying, testing, development, demos and/or performing a proof-of-concept.  You could certainly build this lab environment on your own hardware, but due to the level of SharePoint 2013 hardware requirements, a lot of us may not have sufficient spare hardware to implement an on-premise lab environment.

This makes a great scenario for leveraging our Windows Azure FREE 90-day Trial Offer to build a free lab environment for SharePoint 2013 in the cloud.  Using the process outlined in this article, you’ll be able to build a basic functional farm environment for SharePoint 2013 that will be accessible for approximately 105 hours of compute usage each month at no cost to you under the 90-day Trial Offer ...

Windows Azure Infrastructure Services launched on April 16th for production workloads, and we're already seeing tremendous interest around Several Key IT Pro Scenarios relating to off-site backup, disaster recovery and running key web application VMs in the cloud, such as SharePoint Server 2013.

On May 21st, we'll be offering two FREE half-day hands-on training sessions in Detroit, MI for extending your Datacenter with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to support common scenarios.  Seating is very limited, so be sure to register today to learn how to master these popular scenarios!

UPDATE: I've updated this Guided Hands-on Lab to reflect the new Virtual Network capabilities that were launched with the General Availability announcement of Windows Azure, including support for a Windows Server 2012 On-premises VPN Gateway device.

This month, my fellow IT Pro Technical Evangelists and I are authoring a new articles series on 20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.  You can catch the full series at http://aka.ms/CloudTop20.  In today's article in this series, we'll discuss extending our On-premises Datacenter into a Hybrid Network Infrastructure with Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure Virtual Networks and Site-to-Site VPN Tunnels.

Windows Azure Virtual Networks offers the power to open up several cross-premises use case scenarios, including Active Directory Disaster Recovery, SQL Database Replication, Windows Server 2012 DFS-R File Replication, Accelerated Cloud File Services with BranchCache, Hybrid Web Applications and MORE!  But … we need to configure the Virtual Network FIRST … which is what this Guided Hands-on Lab is all about!