Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 7.0 Now Available

Get ready for Windows Server 2012 with MAP 7.0!

The Solution Accelerators team is pleased to announce the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 7.0 is now available for download.

Download MAP 7.0 now from https://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?&id=7826

Get ready for Windows Server 2012 with the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 7.0. The latest version of the MAP Toolkit adds several new planning scenarios that help you build for the future with agility and focus while lowering the cost of delivering IT. Download MAP 7.0 and begin planning your server deployments today!

New capabilities allow you to:

· Understand your readiness to deploy Windows Server 2012 in your environment

· Determine Windows 8 readiness. For more info, see this blog post.

· Investigate how Windows Server and System Center can manage your heterogeneous environment through VMware migration and Linux server virtualization assessments

· Size your desktop virtualization needs for both Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and session-based virtualization using Remote Desktop Services. For more information, see these blog posts.

· Ready your information platform for the cloud with the SQL Server 2012 discovery and migration assessment. For more info, see this blog post.

· Evaluate your licensing needs with usage tracking for Lync 2010, active users and devices, SQL Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012. For more information, see this blog post.

Key Features and Benefits

Assess Windows Server 2012 readiness

MAP 7.0 assesses the readiness of your IT infrastructure for a Windows Server 2012 deployment. This feature includes detailed and actionable recommendations indicating the machines that meet Windows Server 2012 system requirements and which may require hardware updates. A comprehensive inventory of servers, operating systems, workloads, devices, and server roles is included to help in your planning efforts.

Determine Windows 8 desktop readiness

MAP 7.0 assesses the readiness of your IT environment for your Windows 8 desktop deployment. This feature evaluates your existing hardware against the recommended system requirements for Windows. It provides recommendations detailing which machines meet the requirements and which machines may require hardware upgrades. 

Key benefits include:

· Assessment report and summary proposal to help you to understand the scope and benefits of a Windows desktop deployment.

· Inventory of desktop computers, deployed operating systems, and applications.

Virtualize your Linux servers on Hyper-V

MAP 7.0 extends its server virtualization scenario to include Linux operating systems. Now, MAP enables you to 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 both the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track scenario, as well as the traditional Server Virtualization and Consolidation scenario.

Key features allow you to:

· Incorporate non-Windows machines into your virtualization planning.

· View consolidation guidance and validated configurations with preconfigured Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track infrastructures, including computing power, network, and storage architectures.

· Get a quick analysis of server consolidation on Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track infrastructures to help accelerate your planning of physical to virtual (P2V) migration to Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track.

· Review recommended guidance and next steps using Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track.

More features and benefits.

Other improvements:

We continue to work on improving the MAP platform based on user feedback. One of the areas we improved is the overall MAP 7.0 Setup by switching over to use SQL Server 2012 LocalDB instead of SQL Server 2008 R2 Express by default. For more information about the improvements to the MAP Setup, see this blog post. We have also added another method for you to provide feedback directly to the MAP team as your feedback is critical to our development team. We have added the In-App Feedback feature that allows you to send feedback to our team directly within the MAP Toolkit. For more information on this new feedback feature, see this blog post.

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