Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 5.5 Beta

The next version of MAP is here—5.5 Beta.

Simplify planning for upgrade or migration to the latest Microsoft products and technologies with the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.5 Beta. This multifaceted tool is now even better—withassessment for easier migration to Windows Azure and SQL Azure, heterogeneous databasediscovery for SQL Server migration projects, Windows Internet Explorer 8 upgrade assessment, and much more—MAP 5.5 Beta includes new features to help you streamline planning for your next migration project.

Desktop migration projects are easier with the hardware assessment for Windows 7 and Internet Explorer. The MAP 5.5 Internet Explorer Upgrade Assessment inventories and reports on browser helper objects, add-ins, and plug-ins—and delivers the findings in a convenient migration assessment report and proposal.

Enhanced server consolidation features help users save time and effort when creating virtualization assessments and proposals. Enhancements include improved data accuracy, updated hardware libraries with the latest CPU models, customized server selection, and improved scalability and reliability for more data collection and better analysis.

MAP also helps accelerate SQL Server migration projects with heterogeneous database discovery for MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase instances.

Enjoy quicker, easier migrations and upgrades—saving your organization time and money—when you take advantage of the agentless, automated discovery and detailed infrastructure assessments from MAP.

What’s new with MAP Toolkit 5.5?

Assess your environment for upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows Internet Explorer 8 (or the latest version). Are you looking for a tool to simplify your organization’s migration to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8—and, in turn, enjoy improved desktop security, reliability and manageability? The MAP 5.5 Internet Explorer Upgrade Assessment inventories your environment and reports on deployed web browsers, Microsoft ActiveX controls, plug-ins and toolbars, and then generates a migration assessment report and proposal—information you need to more easily migrate to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 (or the latest version).

Identify and analyze web application, and database readiness for migration to Windows Azure and SQL Azure. Simplify your move to the cloud with the MAP 5.5 automated discovery and detailed inventory reporting on database and web application readiness for Windows Azure and SQL Azure. MAP identifies web applications, IIS servers, and SQL Server databases, analyzes their performance characteristics, and estimates required cloud features such as number of Windows Azure compute instances, number of SQL Azure databases, bandwidth usage, and storage.

Discover heterogeneous database instances for migration to SQL Server. Now with heterogeneous database inventory supported, MAP 5.5 helps you accelerate migration to SQL Server with network inventory reporting for MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase instances.

Enhanced server consolidation assessments for Hyper-V.

Enhanced server consolidation capabilities help you save time and effort when creating virtualization assessments and proposals. Enhancements include:

• Updated hardware libraries allowing you to select from the latest Intel and AMD processors.                       
• Customized server selection for easy editing of assessment data.                                                                                                                                   
• Data collection and store every five minutes for more accurate reporting.
•  Better scalability and reliability, requiring less oversight of the data collection process.
• Support for more machines.

More Info here https://connect.microsoft.com/site297

Azure’s Late Infrastructure Start

One of the interesting announcements from last month’s Microsoft Professional Development Conference was that Azure will soon include the ability for customers to run a virtual machine instance of Windows Server 2008. What took them so long?

Up until this point, Azure has primarily been an platform-as-a-service (PAAS) offering. This new virtual machine role brings Microsoft into the infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS) world, and directly into competition with Amazon, which has been offering its EC2 service since 2006 — and Windows operating system support since 2008, before Azure was even announced. As elegant as the Azure platform might be as an architecture, it’s also intimidating to customers that are getting started with cloud computing — that’s just about everyone, isn’t it? The ability to migrate existing applications to cloud-based servers encourages people to get their feet wet; up until now the best place to do that was on Amazon Web Services.

Although IAAS requires customers to do more of the grunt work of managing servers, it’s a natural and simple transition to cloud-based services. You just create an operating system image for the software to be run in the VM image, upload it to the cloud, and spin it up on one or more VM instances. You can easily migrate existing servers to a cloud without changing any of the application software. That’s not the case with Azure, which is a new platform (incorporating many existing Microsoft technologies) best suited for new development.

When it comes to cloud computing, Microsoft has one big advantage over its competitors: it doesn’t have to pay for Windows licenses. This adds some uncertainty for Amazon EC2 pricing, and Amazonconcedes it with a disclaimer: “If Microsoft chooses to increase the license fees that it charges for Windows, we may correspondingly increase the per-hour usage rate for previously purchased Reserved Instances with Windows.”

Essentially, Microsoft has simply broadened the Azure umbrella to cover VM-based IAAS as well. Yet I’m still puzzled why this didn’t happen sooner. If anything, it seems like Microsoft could have started Azure with IAAS and let customers grow into PAAS as they became comfortable with having their data in the cloud. Now, it may become harder for Microsoft to convince the industry it’s a leader (or even a player) when Amazon has a four-year head start on the IAAS business.