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AZ-802 deep review — September 27, 2026

The complete guide was read and mapped against 115 detailed objectives in 18 subgroups. Accepted objective and status snapshots are unchanged. Active delivery is retained and stale beta wording removed. The separate five-day AZ-802T00 course is available despite unavailable-training text on the credential page; practice assessment availability must still be checked before relying on it.

Content improvements

  • Add prerequisite-based service-account reasoning, including supported dMSA hosts, a discoverable Windows Server 2025 DC and unsupported migration combinations.
  • Explain why a PowerShell second-hop decision needs the downstream protocol and principal; constrained delegation is not a supported nested WinRM solution.
  • Separate GPU-P compatibility, migration requirements and surviving capacity. A two-node example has eight partitions normally but only four after losing a node, leaving a two-partition deficit for six modeled workloads.
  • Explain File Sync offline availability: a visible tiered filename does not prove that its contents are cached. Separate client SMB traffic from agent HTTPS traffic.
  • Correct Server 2025 SMB signing defaults; clarify OSConfig policy authority and restoration limits, installed-update phases for RC4, retired direct AMA telemetry and VM Insights Map's restricted onboarding and retirement.

Four worked examples, a ninth evidence lab and six new answers bring the guide to nine labs and 34 answered checks. The new lab requires recording versions, prerequisites, a success and a failure case, evidence and rollback. A paper worksheet is explicitly distinguished from executed infrastructure evidence.

Blog selection

Orin Thomas's GPU Partitioning in Windows Server 2025 Hyper-V (Microsoft Tech Community, July 2, 2025) was accepted as a bounded architecture reading. Its public embedded article was read. Current product documentation supersedes the article's one-partition-per-VM limit; the guide assumes one partition per modeled workload only for its arithmetic. Hardware support does not guarantee spare capacity or successful live migration. Linked commands were not executed.

Matthew Palko's Beyond RC4 for Windows authentication (Microsoft, December 3, 2025; updated February 4, 2026) was accepted for account-key and event reasoning. Current KB5073381 controls the rollout dates and support boundaries; linked scripts were not executed. Both readings have attribution, a time estimate, an original exercise and current primary documentation in the guide.

Evidence and remaining limits

ADLC_Docs/operations/2026-09-27-az-802-deep-review.json preserves prior records, guide hashes, objective positions/hashes and section mappings, source observations, blog decisions, citation counts and validation results. Historical accepted objective/status snapshots were not rewritten.

SSH Direct remains an official objective without a verified current supported end-to-end guest recipe. The historical CentOS package URL now returns 404; the shared SSH evidence preserves that limitation. Five paid catalog pages remain access-blocked. Historical displayed course durations and contents do not establish current lesson access.

Synthetic GPU capacity arithmetic was checked offline. No GPU, Hyper-V, Azure, Windows Server, AD DS or File Sync infrastructure lab was executed. Research and repair used the same AI context; independent and human review remain pending. The shared publication gate covers unit tests, repository validation, strict site build and generated-site checks. See the Microsoft review tracker for remaining work.