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Back in May the MD-100 exam was received a major update, and like many other exams, it’s just received a minor update to add Microsoft Entra to the description, this time to the audience profile.

While this is a minor change, it’s worth discussing what this could mean in exam questions right now. The new wording is “Candidates for this exam administer Windows clients in a Microsoft Azure Active Directory
(Azure AD), part of Microsoft Entra environment.” You will notice that it looks like search and replace was used, based on the current description having “Candidates for this exam administer Windows clients in an Azure Active Directory environment.” The new wording feels a bit weird to me, because I haven’t really seen the term “Microsoft Entra environment” used anywhere else.

Anyway, ignoring the somewhat suspect wording of the bad search and replace, what this means is that you should be familiar with the other capabilities of Entra, but also make sure that other brands/names that Microsoft has introduced over the few years are familiar to you. Things like Priva, Purview and Viva, for example.

I mentioned earlier that the exam had a major update in May, so let’s take a look at what those changes are in case you missed them. The exam description was altered quite drastically, but most of what you need to know hasn’t changed. There were a few small additions, mostly the manage accounts, VPN connections, certificates and user profiles objectives from MD-101 have been moved into this exam.. There was a new section on Hyper-V, so if you don’t have much exposure to it, make sure you enable it and run through some guides to learn how it works.

Client Hyper-V was first introduced with Windows 8, and has been a part of multiple Windows client exams prior to this reappearance. While I don’t know the exact reason for the return, there are a few things I can think of. First of all, making sure that you have more awareness of the hardware requirements of Hyper-V, especially considering that virtualization technologies sit underneath several Windows security technologies. The second reason that comes to mind is that running multiple operating systems concurrently, whether via Windows Subsystem for Linux, in virtual machines, or containerized has become more of a requirement for many of us.

The other areas that were added is that the manage accounts, VPN connections, certificates and user profiles pieces of MD-101 have been moved into this exam.

This exam can be tougher for is those who need to do it in order to get the Microsoft 365 Certified: Modern Desktop Administrator Associate certification, but have come into the world of modern management via managing and supporting other operating systems, such as MacOS, Android and iOS. This means that there are going to be some core (okay, for some of you this might translate to legacy) Windows features that may have existed for a decade or more that you will see for the first time.

MD-101 tends to be an easier exam if you fall into that category, but preparing for this exam will help to fill in some of your Windows knowledge gaps that should help you to better understand how Windows works. What you will notice with some of the links I’ve included below is that they are effectively going to some pretty old content in Microsoft docs, as some of the features aren’t really things that get much attention these days.

Install and configure Windows (20–25%)

Install Windows client

Manage and use Hyper-V on Windows client

Configure Windows settings

Configure and manage connectivity and storage (15–20%)

Configure networking and access

Configure and manage storage

Maintain Windows (30–35%)

Perform system and data recovery

Manage Windows updates

Configure remote management

Monitor and manage Windows

Protect devices and data (25–30%)

Manage users, groups, and computer objects

Configure and manage local and group policies

Manage security settings on Windows client