Brief overview of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 8.0

Recently the Solution Accelerator Team released the RTM version of Microsoft Assessment and Planning 8.0 (MAP) Toolkit. 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.

Overview. 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.

Scenarios. The toolkit provides different scenarios for Cloud, Desktop (Virtualization), Server (Virtualization), Database. Each scenario provides detailed information of the selected scenario including the ability to generate reports. The information is presented in a simple but comprehensive way and appears similar to the panes as we know it in Windows 8.

Cloud & Fast Private Cloud Fast Track. This assessment offers detailed deployment and sizing recommendations based on key performance metrics and detailed hardware specifications of each server that the Microsoft® Assessment and Planning (MAP) tool inventoried across the network.

MAP provides Consolidation guidance and validated configurations with preconfigured Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track infrastructures, including computing power, network, and storage architectures. In addition pre-defined reference architectures can be imported and used as reference infrastructure to determine whether the current workloads fits.

The Performance Metrics Wizard is used to collect specific performance related information such as CPU, memory, network and disk utilization for Windows servers and clients as well as LINUX based servers. The information gathered through this collection mechanism supports the capacity planning features for server consolidation, desktop virtualization, Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track and Azure Application migration.

Reports and Proposals. The MAP Toolkit provides extensive reporting capabilities including

32 custom reports and proposals that are specific to the environment the Toolkit inventoried. For more detailed sample reports click here.

Visit the MAP Download Center page for more information including install instructions and system requirements.