Week 20 of my MCSE studies has been a little more intense than I have been used to. I accomplished far more than I have in any previous week. In the 70-410 study guide, I finished chapters 7, 8, and 9. In the 'Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches', I completed chapters 9, 10, and 11. I also decided to retake the 70-410 live, instructor led course and completed sessions 1 & 2 along with the pre and post tests. In addition to all of that, I got caught up on my extra reading from various TechNet articles, blogs, and other posts. It has been a great week!
Cool Stuff
The coolest thing I learned this past week was how to use Windows Server 2012 R2 to host an iSCSI target. Once I had a couple of iSCSI targets set up on a 2012 R2 server, I connected my VMWare ESX server to one of them and created a datastore, and then I connected another 2012 R2 server to the second one and created a drive. There was a great sense of accomplishment once I had them setup and running.
My understanding of how iSCSI works, and what all of the terminology meant had always been a bit of a mystery to me.This past week has been a real eye-opener into this particular storage technology, and I feel much more confident about using it now.
PowerShell cmdlet of the Week
This week I had an opportunity to learn a lot more about PowerShell. Picking just one of these is going to be tricky, but here goes:
Format-Table
I have used this one occasionally in the past, but just recently learned how to use it correctly. My favorite parameter is -AutoSize. It really cleans up the output when you only want a few columns displayed. It helps prevent your table from being spread across the entire width of the display. Consider the following two examples:
Say you wanted to get a list of running processes and how much memory each one is using. You can use the following on-liner to fetch the information and display it for you:
Get-Process | Select-Object -Property Name,VM | Format-Table
It does produce the desired output, but look, it spreads the two columns out across the entire display, making it a little difficult to read. Try it again with the -AutoSize parameter:
Get-Process | Select-Object -Property Name,VM | Format-Table -AutoSize
Much better! The -AutoSize parameter narrowed the columns to be just wide enough to display the information passed to it. Now the information is presented in an easier to read format.
Keep in mind, you can shorten Format-Table -AutoSize using it's alias and a little shorthand:
ft -a
That's it for this weeks cmdlet!
Stats
Total time studying: 22 hrs.
- PowerShell: 2 hrs. 55 min.
- 70-410: 19 hrs. 5 min.
Resources used:
In Closing
This past week was a lot of fun! I enjoyed being able to focus in on my studies and make some real progress. The quizzes I have been taking are proving to be very useful in pointing out areas that I need to spend a little more time learning about. One of those areas in particular, is the IPv6 transition technologies. I still do not have a firm grasp of what each one is used for, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. However, this knowledge will come in time.
This coming up week, I plan to complete my first pass through the 70-410 Training Guide, attend sessions 3 & 4 through KnowledgeNet, and get in at least 3 more chapters on PowerShell.
Have a great week everyone!
In Closing
This past week was a lot of fun! I enjoyed being able to focus in on my studies and make some real progress. The quizzes I have been taking are proving to be very useful in pointing out areas that I need to spend a little more time learning about. One of those areas in particular, is the IPv6 transition technologies. I still do not have a firm grasp of what each one is used for, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. However, this knowledge will come in time.
This coming up week, I plan to complete my first pass through the 70-410 Training Guide, attend sessions 3 & 4 through KnowledgeNet, and get in at least 3 more chapters on PowerShell.
Have a great week everyone!
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