Well, I ended up pushing the exam back by a couple of days because I was feeling unprepared. Today I still felt unprepared, but since it was too late to re-schedule I took it this afternoon and passed anyway.
It was a very odd exam. There were no simulations or exhibits on this exam, it's 100% multiple choice and the "choose two/three" variety. Furthermore, all of the questions that I had only had four options to choose from. I'm used to seeing more choices on some questions.
The breakdown for me was 20 for the Application Infrastructure category, 20 for the Network Infrastructure category, and 9 for the Directory Service category. Keep in mind that this exam is scored as three tests, and you get a separate score for each category. However, the score used to determine whether you pass or fail is the lowest of the three (or at least mine was).
Application Infrastructure had a lot about Terminal Services, a fair amount of IIS, some Hyper-V questions that were generic enough that they could have applied to VMWare as well, failover clustering/NLB, and some Windows Deployment Services. Then there were a few generic questions that weren't Windows 2008 specific, like setting up a RAID5 array.
Network Infrastructure had a fair amount on NAP/remote access/RADIUS, wireless authentication, performance and stability monitoring, and only two questions on netmon. There was also a surprising amount of questions on WSUS, again a topic that isn't specific to Windows 2008.
Directory services was split almost equally between Read-Only DCs, AD LDS, and AD Rights Management. I expected the heavy emmphasis on RODCs, but not so much about RM and LDS. Of the three sections this one was the only one where all of the questions were 2008-specifc.
Somewhere around 20% of my questions required knowledge of command-line tools, so definitely brush up on them.
Several of the questions had the exact same answer, word for word, listed twice. A lot of the questions had choices available that had nothing whatsoever to do with what the question was about. I wouldn't say that it was quite the level of "one obvious answer and three stupid ones", but on a lot of the questions it was close. The exam was much easier than I expected.
Since it is a new exam I get the impression that this exam is/will be changing quickly. It really seemed too easy for being a combination of three exams, and it was a bit rough around the edges in places. If I were someone considering taking the exam, I would recommend taking it sooner rather than later. I truly expect that it is going to be toughened up and refined once they start seeing the range of scores and candidate feedback.
I've taken 13 CompTIA and MS exams since Christmas, and this was the most worrying by far to prepare for due to the lack of training material. I think that I missed having practice exams the most. I took a three-day "partner preparation" class for the exam and I re-read the class manual cover-to-cover over this past weekend. Other than putting up a couple of 2008 boxes to play with Hyper-V and Server Core, that's all of the preparation that I did.
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CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCSE:Security 2003
MCTS:Active Directory
MCTS:Network Infrastructure
MCTS:Applications Infrastructure