Administering Windows Server (AZ-802) — Practice Questions and Mock Exam

AZ-802 is the one exam standing between a Windows Server administrator and the Microsoft Certified: Windows Server Administrator Associate badge. It arrived as the replacement for the AZ-800 plus AZ-801 pair, which Microsoft retires on 30 September 2026 — so where the old path asked for two sittings, one for core infrastructure and one for advanced services, the new one asks for a single 120-minute exam that spans the whole job.

The scope is the working day of somebody who keeps Windows Server running wherever it happens to live: a domain controller in a rack, a Hyper-V host, a fleet of Azure VMs, a file server that now syncs to an Azure file share. Microsoft expects you to be fluent with Windows Admin Center, Hyper-V, PowerShell, Azure Arc, Azure Monitor, Azure Update Manager and Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and to know Active Directory well enough to repair it, not merely to configure it. Roughly a fifth of the exam is directory work alone; another third is storage plus monitoring and troubleshooting. Very little of it is pure Azure and very little is pure on-premises — nearly every topic is asked in its hybrid form.

The Pass-IT question pool gives you material to practice for AZ-802. A Pass-IT mock exam uses 50 questions and a 120-minute time limit; these are practice settings.

Seven areas carry the exam, and their published shares tell you where to spend the evening. Directory work is the largest at a fifth to a quarter: domain controllers on both sides of the hybrid line, read-only replicas and the account security around them, the single-master roles, trusts across sites, domains and forests, replication topologies, principals and service accounts, and everything Group Policy delivers.

Storage plus file services and the monitoring-and-troubleshooting area come next, each around a sixth. Storage runs from Azure file shares and file synchronisation, including the migrations off DFS and off classic shares, through resource management and namespaces on the server itself, down to disks, resilient storage pools, block-level replication, deduplication, RDMA transfers, quality of service, ReFS versus NTFS, iSCSI targets and volume encryption. Monitoring and troubleshooting pairs the observation tools — performance counters, collector sets, insights, event logs, cloud collection rules and alerting — with the repair work: names that do not resolve, updates that will not install, clocks that drift, extensions that fail, encrypted volumes that will not unlock, and a directory that needs its recycle bin, a restore-mode boot, a rebuilt system volume, or a fix for Kerberos and machine-account trust.

The remaining four areas share the last third roughly evenly. Hybrid instance management is remote administration done properly — the browser-based console run locally and from inside the Azure portal, remoting with the double-hop problem solved and constrained endpoints, secure shell, remote desktop — plus the Azure services that reach onto physical machines: Arc onboarding, Arc configuration, extensions pushed onto machines that do not run in Azure, patching, and runbooks. Virtual machines cover the hypervisor host and its guests (session mode, direct consoles, nesting, memory, integration components, hardware pass-through, GPU sharing, checkpoints, virtual disks, switches, adapter teaming, replication, guest clustering) and the same fleet once it lives in Azure. Networking is name resolution and addressing: directory-integrated zones and records, forwarders, resolution across the hybrid boundary, resolution policies, signed zones, and the address-lease service with its scopes, reservations and failover. Security hardens two layers — the operating system through exploit mitigation, application allow-listing, credential isolation, reputation checks, policy-delivered settings, a baseline tool, managed local administrator passwords, server protection and the firewall; and the directory through password policy, cloud-backed password protection, protected accounts, hardened and access-restricted controllers, account and administrative-group options, delegation, and the authentication protocols themselves.

You get 120 minutes and need a scaled score of 700 or better out of 1,000 to pass. The exam is proctored, offered in English only, and Microsoft's exam page warns that it may include interactive components alongside the ordinary question types. Microsoft publishes neither a question count nor a breakdown of question formats for this exam, so any figure you see quoted for either is somebody's estimate rather than a vendor statement — including ours. What Microsoft does publish is the weighting of the seven skill areas, expressed as ranges rather than fixed percentages, which is why a practice run that mirrors the blueprint will vary a little from sitting to sitting. There is an official exam sandbox you can open beforehand to click through the question types in the real interface; at the time of writing, Microsoft's own practice assessment for AZ-802 was not yet available.

Booking runs through Pearson VUE, online-proctored or at a test centre, and Microsoft recommends registering with a personal Microsoft account rather than a work or school one, because exam records tied to an organisational account are lost — and cannot be recovered — if you leave that organisation. The price depends on the country or region in which the exam is proctored. Accommodations, including extra time, are requested before you book. Fail it and you may retake it 24 hours later; for further attempts the waiting period lengthens, so plan the first sitting as if it were the only one. English is currently the only language on offer. The certification is valid for one year and renews for free through an online assessment on Microsoft Learn — a short unproctored test you can take from your own desk, not a re-sitting of the exam.