Welcome to part 3 of a 6 part series talking about a great FREE tool, which has released it’s 5th major version on Monday (7-12-2010).  The MAP toolkit has been around for years.  MAP is a powerful inventory, assessment, and reporting tool that can securely run in small or large IT environments without requiring the installation of agent software on any computers or devices. The new version, MAP 5.0, has some exciting new features to help with discovery and software usage. In this screencast we take a look how MAP can assist your Windows Server Virtualization planning and consolidation.
The MAP tool helps you to gather information about your environment and analyze the results of your assessments to determine how to proceed with server consolidation efforts. These steps include wizards and a calculator to help you:

  • Inventory your server environment. You can use the Inventory and Assessment Wizard to gather information about your server environment, including hardware configurations, roles, applications and services running on those computers.
  • Gather performance metrics. You can use the Performance Metrics Wizard to gather information about the CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization of computers for a duration you specify. The MAP tool can provide better consolidation recommendations if peak utilization data is gathered. If you know when peak utilization will occur, start capturing data with a leading hour before the peak and set the duration to include an hour after the peak utilization is expected to end. If peak utilization periods are unknown, it is recommended to collect performance data for longer periods of time. If you are attempting to capture utilization information for machines with different peak utilization periods, it is recommended to gather this information over a longer period of time to capture all peak periods or to gather utilization information for each set of computers in different performance metric gathering runs.
  • Performance counters are collected from each machine in five minute intervals. The number of machines from which the MAP tool can collect performance counter data successfully depends upon factors such as network latency and the responsiveness of servers. If you want to collect performance data for a large number of machines, it is recommended to split the target machines into batches of up to 150 machines.
  • Configure host and run analysis engine. You can use the Server Virtualization Planning Wizard to help in planning your server virtualization effort. In this wizard, you can select a virtualization technology platform, set a virtual host machine’s hardware configuration, manage assessment properties and identify which computers you would like to virtualize. Use the Hardware Library wizard to create and manage often used hardware configurations for quick what-if analysis.
  • Calculate potential ROI. You can evaluate potential ROI associated with the consolidation recommendations made by the MAP Toolkit using Alinean’s Integrated Virtualization ROI calculator. MAP generates an XML file at the end of every server consolidation assessment. Import the XML file into the Alinean Virtualization Integration ROI calculator to analyze potential ROI. To learn more, go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149142 .

To learn more about MAP please take a look at the following: