Free Deployment help for Windows Server 2008

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Windows Sever 2008 is out the door, Hyper-V has shipped and SQL 2008 is not far behind. Customers are still upgrading to Vista and Office 2008 so all is good. While not if you are the folks in charge of deploying all of this. If so you may be working your tail off to understand what boxes you currently have that will support the new operating systems. You may also be asking questions like: Which servers can be virtualized? If I upgrade will I have compatibility issues? Questions like these need to be answered before organizations deploy Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, and SQL 2008. Client questions while very similar still need to be answered before you can deploy Vista and Office 2007. To help you or your customers answer many of these questions let me introduce the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP). MAP is an inventory, assessment, and reporting tool that can be used in small or large IT shops. One very nice feature is that it does not require the installation of an agent. Here are a few thing that it can be used for:

Secure and Agentless Inventory
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) provides secure, agent-less and network-wide inventory that scales from small business to large enterprises.

Comprehensive Data Analysis
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) performs a detailed analysis of hardware and device compatibility for migration to Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Application Virtualization, and Windows Vista.

In-Depth Readiness Reporting
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) generates reports containing both summary and detailed assessment results for each migration scenario. The results are provided in both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word documents.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is a great tool for helping you manage your virtual environment and I highly recommend it. However many times and organization would like to get some information about doing server consolidation with Hyper-V or Virtual Server in their environment without first deploying SCVMM. Well MAP can help with this too. It has a Server Consolidation and Virtualization Wizard that can be used to provide a server consolidation and virtualization assessment. This wizard performs the following functions to complete the assessment:

  • Performs an inventory of the computers considered for consolidation and virtualization.
  • Consumes the performance monitoring data collected by the Performance Metrics Wizard.
  • Allows the user to provide a “model” virtual server that will host virtual machines (guests).
  • Determines the number and placement of guests on the virtual server.
  • Provides detailed reports and proposals describing which servers can be virtualized and on which virtual server host computers the consolidation process can be carried out.

As you can see this tool can be a very useful addition to your toolbox and the price is right, free! For more information on MAP please see the following link:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977556(TechNet.10).aspx

Ok so you are still having trouble sleeping because you are in charge of helping plan and design some of your organization’s or your customer’s infrastructure and if it fails heads will roll. Well don’t worry take a look at our Infrastructure Planning and Design Series on TechNet.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc196387(TechNet.10).aspx

This will either help answer your questions or put you to sleep as you read another NAP paper. Either way it is a good resource to help both you and your customers with infrastructure planning and providing some best practices.

Until next time, enjoy!