Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 6.5 Available

In The Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2011, we found that just 42% of those who had deployed Hyper-V had done an assessment.  My own experiences reveal an interesting trend: those who have architectural, support, or performance issues with their deployment have not done an assessment.  They stuck a wet finger in the air, guessed at an infrastructure sizing and design, and their customer/employer paid the price.

By the way, the best VMware consultants will kick of the project using some assessment.

The tool for a Hyper-V assessment is MAP, and Microsoft recently launched version 6.5 of it.  This new release adds:

  • Discover Oracle instances on Itanium-based servers for migration to SQL Server: useful for SQL Server migration projects when you tire of the price and virtualisation support of Oracle.
  • Assess your software usage and evaluate your licensing needs with the Software Usage Tracking feature, now updated with the Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) scenario: get your licensing right before and auditor does.
  • Accelerate planning for the private cloud with Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track Onboarding: FAST is the Microsoft private cloud architecture for their big international partners.
  • Identify migration opportunities with enhanced heterogeneous server environment inventory: this stuff supports MySQL, Linux and VMware scanning.
  • Accelerate planning and migration with the new UI and usability updates in MAP 6.5: All new UI to lay out stuff more logically.

What’s nice about MAP is that you can assess even a large environment with just a small amount of effort.  You have empirical data that can scientifically calculate your environment.  From a Hyper-V perspective, this sizing is difficult to do without an assessment.  In fact, it would be a complete guess without something like the free MAP.  If you do the assessment then at least you and your customer (internal or external) can be sure that you did a scientific calculation that has some sort of backing instead of just assuming.

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