Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit DOWNLOAD

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an agentless inventory, assessment, and reporting tool that can securely assess IT environments for various platform migrations—including Windows 8, Windows 7, Office 2010 and Office 365, Windows Server 2012 and Windows 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012, Hyper-V, Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track, and Windows Azure.

Accelerate your migration to Windows 8, Windows 7
and Internet Explorer 9

Quickly and efficiently collect detailed infrastructure information you need for planning your migration to Windows 8 Enterprise. Create a client inventory report, let MAP analyze the data to assess your environment’s readiness, and access the following migration reports and proposals:

• Windows 8 readiness assessment report: The Windows 8 Assessment summarizes the readiness of computers on your network for migration to Windows 8. It includes detailed hardware and operating system information about each desktop, indicates which computers meet the hardware requirements for Windows 8 and also lists applications installed.
• Hardware Inventory Proposal: MAP identifies currently installed Windows client operating systems and provides a detailed analysis of your hardware.

With the MAP Toolkit, you also get the following reports and proposals for migration to Windows Internet Explorer 9:

• Internet Explorer Migration Assessment Report: MAP identifies web browsers deployed on client computers in your environment, and provides details on the inventoried clients, browsers, Active X controls, and add-ons.
• Internet Explorer Migration Proposal: MAP summarizes the results of the assessment report, providing the information you need to migrate to Internet Explorer 9.

What is the MAP Toolkit?

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit is an agentless tool designed to simplify and streamline the IT infrastructure planning process across multiple scenarios through network-wide automated discovery and assessments.

This versatile toolkit:

• Quickly discovers clients, heterogeneous servers, and applications across your IT environment.
• Provides discovery and detailed inventory reporting of web application portfolios and database readiness for the Windows Azure Platform.
• Assesses Windows 2000 Server environments and legacy workloads to identify the potential business impact of maintaining legacy workloads, and the benefits of migration to Windows Server 2008 R2.
• Conducts migration and virtualization assessments for your IT projects.
• Provides analysis of consolidating servers on Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track infrastructures.
• Accurately assesses current software usage and client access history in your environment.
• Assesses hardware and software readiness for Office 365.
• Gathers database and server instance details across your organization for simplified database administration and SQL Server consolidation.
• Auto-generates reports and proposals.
• Scales well to small businesses as well as large enterprises.

About This Solution Accelerator

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) is an agentless, automated, multi-product planning and assessment tool for quicker and easier desktop, server and cloud migrations. MAP provides detailed readiness assessment reports and executive proposals with extensive hardware and software information, and actionable recommendations to help organizations accelerate their IT infrastructure planning process, and gather more detail on assets that reside within their current environment. MAP also provides server utilization data for Hyper-V server virtualization planning; identifying server placements, and performing virtualization candidate assessments, including ROI analysis for server consolidation with Hyper-V.

The latest version of the MAP Toolkit adds eight new scenarios to help you plan your IT future while supporting your current business needs. Included scenarios help you to:

·         Plan your deployment of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 with hardware and infrastructure readiness assessments

·         Size your desktop virtualization needs for both Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and session-based virtualization using Remote Desktop Services

·         Ready your information platform for the cloud with SQL Server 2012

·         Virtualize your existing Linux servers onto Hyper-V

·         Identify opportunities to lower your virtualization costs with Hyper-V using the VMware migration assessment

·         Assess user and device access for Lync 2010 Standard licensing

Key features and benefits of MAP 7.0 help you:

• Determine your readiness for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
• Migrate your VMware-based virtual machines to Hyper-V
• Size your server environment for desktop virtualization
• Simplify migration to SQL Server 2012
• Evaluate your licensing needs for Lync 2010
• Determine active users and devices

MAP is just one of the tools provided by the Microsoft Solution Accelerators team. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and Security Compliance Manager provide tested guidance and automated tools to help organizations plan, securely deploy, and manage new Microsoft technologies—easier, faster, and at less cost. All are freely available, and fully-supported by Microsoft.

Feature Overview

MAP performs four key functions: discovery and inventory of computers and applications, hardware and software migration readiness assessments, software usage tracking, and capacity planning for virtualization, public and private cloud migration.

MAP provides secure, agentless, and network-wide inventory that scales from small business to large enterprises. It collects and organizes system resources and device information from a single networked computer. Assessment tools often require users to first deploy software agents on all computers to be inventoried, but this tool does not. MAP uses technologies already available in your IT environment to perform inventory and assessments. These technologies include Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), the Remote Registry Service, Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), SSH, and the Computer Browser service.

You can use MAP to inventory the following technologies:

• Windows 8 RC
• Windows 7
• Windows Vista
• Windows XP Professional
• Office 2010 and previous versions
• Windows Server 2012
• Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2003 R2
• Windows 2000 Professional or Windows 2000 Server
• Windows Internet Explorer 9 and previous versions
• VMware vSphere
• VMware vCenter
• VMware ESX
• VMware ESXi
• VMware Server
• Selected Linux distributions
• LAMP application stack discovery
• SQL Server
• MySQL
• Oracle
• Sybase
• Hyper-V
• Lync
• System Center Configuration Manager
• Forefront Endpoint Protection

Note:  To see a list of platforms on which MAP can be installed, refer to the “Installation Prerequisites” section of the MAP Release Notes.

Comprehensive Data Analysis

MAP performs a detailed analysis of hardware for migration to Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Office 2010, and Office 365. The hardware assessment looks at the installed hardware and determines if migration is recommended. If it is not recommended, then reports provide information about why it is not.

The device assessment looks at the devices installed on a computer and reports availability of drivers for those devices. Device assessment can be used for migration and consolidation scenarios for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

MAP identifies heterogeneous IT environments consisting of Windows Server, VMware Server, VMware vSphere, VMware VCenter and Linux operating systems, including those running in a virtual environment, and provides discovery of LAMP application stacks. MAP’s VMware discovery feature identifies already-virtualized servers running under VMware that can be managed with the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager platform, or be migrated to the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.

For customers interested in server consolidation and virtualization through technologies such as Hyper-V, MAP helps to gather performance metrics and generate server consolidation recommendations that identify the candidates for server virtualization and suggests how the physical servers might be placed in a virtualized environment.

In-Depth Readiness Reporting

MAP generates reports containing both summary and detailed assessment results for each migration scenario. The results are provided in Microsoft Office Excel workbooks and Microsoft Office Word documents. Reports are generated for the following scenarios:

• Evaluate existing hardware against the recommended system requirements for Windows 8. Recommendations detailing which machines meet the requirements and which machines may require hardware upgrades
• Assess the readiness of your IT infrastructure for a Windows Server 2012 deployment. Includes a comprehensive inventory of servers, operating systems, workloads, devices, and server roles to help in planning efforts
• Gather performance data for Linux-based physical and virtual machines and use that information to perform virtualization and private cloud planning analysis for both Windows and Linux-based machines within the Hyper-V and Private Cloud Fast Track scenarios.
• Identification of currently installed Windows client operating systems, their hardware, and recommendations for migration to Windows 7.
• Inventory and reporting of deployed web browsers, Microsoft ActiveX controls, and add-ons for migration to Windows 7 compatible versions of Internet Explorer.
• Identification of currently installed Microsoft Office software and recommendations for migration to Microsoft Office 2010 and Office 365.
• Identification of currently installed Windows Server operating systems, underlying hardware and devices, as well as recommendations for migration to Windows Server 2008 R2.
• Identification of currently installed Linux operating systems and underlying hardware for virtualization on Hyper-V or management by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager R2.
• Identification of virtual machines running on both Hyper-V and VMware, their hosts, and details about hosts and guests.
• Identification and analysis of web applications, IIS servers, and SQL Server databases for migration to the Windows Azure Platform.
• Detailed assessment and reporting of server utilization, as well as recommendations for server consolidation and virtual machine placement using Hyper-V.
• Discovery of SQL Server 2012 databases, instances, and selected characteristics.
• Heterogeneous database discovery of MySQL, Oracle and Sybase instances.
• Identification of SQL Server host machines and SQL Server components.

Software Usage Tracker Feature Overview

The enhanced Software Usage Tracking feature in MAP 7.0  simplifies your software license management and compliance process in terms of product coverage and the ability to track devices. MAP’s usage tracking scenario measures server and client usage for the each of the core CAL products

Active Users and Devices is a new inventory scenario that allows organizations to report on user which are active on the network in addition to Windows devices. This information is useful in Enterprise Agreement scenarios as well as for maintaining Active Directory information for the environment. This strengthened tracking feature provides consistent software usage reports for the following key Microsoft Server products:

• Windows Server
• SharePoint Server
• Exchange Server
• SQL Server
• System Center Configuration Manager
• Forefront Endpoint Protection
• New! Lync
• New! Active Users and Devices

With the MAP software usage tracker, you can run updated reports whenever you need to accurately assess current software usage and client access history in your environment. This reduces time and administrative costs for managing your server and CALs and helps you to streamline the management of your software assets.

Microsoft Database Consolidation Appliance Feature Overview

The Database Consolidation Appliance allows customers to consolidate thousands of SQL Server instances into a single appliance, simplifying the management of all these databases, while also providing better agility through a fully elastic database infrastructure.

Posted in: microsoft windows,windows 7,windows server,windows server 2003,windows server 2008,windows server 2012,windows vista,windows xp