Microsoft Planning Tools for Your Server Virtualization Projects

Planning is a crucial part of every successful IT project.  Unfortunately, who can ever find enough time to plan? 

Well, Microsoft has developed a set of planning tools (called Solution Accelerators) to help you. Whether you are considering Windows Server 2008 R2 OS migration, consolidation your servers with Hyper-V, or virtualization management with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, you will find these 2 planning tools very helpful to accelerate your planning process, save some valuable time so you can focus on the actual deployment work.

Tool #1: Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides (IPD) for Windows Server Virtualization and Management

The IPD Guides are the Microsoft best practice to help you ask the right questions during the planning phase of your projects and offer you step-by-step guidance through flow-charts and diagrams.  This is especially useful if you have not designed an infrastructure for Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V or System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 before.

Tool #2: Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V

The MAP Toolkit is an agent-less inventory tool that not only discovery machines on your network for device/hardware compatibility checks regarding Windows Server 2008 R2 migration.  It can also collect performance metrics to determine where your under-utilized servers are and which ones are the best virtualization candidates through the use of Hyper-V hypervisor technology.  Also, this MAP Toolkit can analyze your desktops for Windows 7 hardware compatibility as well!

 

Enjoy reading these guides and start tooling up for your Virtualization Projects!

Baldwin Ng (Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft Solution Accelerators)

Published 29 September 09 05:33 by Baldwin Ng

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Comments

# Jennifer Steinberg said on January 20, 2010 6:47 AM:

While we're on the subject of tools, I wanted to alert the community to a tool called Rove Mobile Admin. This product enables IT Pro's to access their IT infrastructure from their smartphone (BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, iPhone). We support Windows Server and Hyper-V. Having immediate access to the network post-migration can really help IT Pros deal with unexpected issues.

# phyllis knisley said on February 8, 2010 9:36 AM:

what is this and how do i use it

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About Baldwin Ng

Baldwin Ng is the Senior Product Manager for the Microsoft Solution Accelerators Core Engineering Team. He works with Microsoft customers, partners and product teams including Windows Vista, 2007 Microsoft Office, Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, Microsoft Application Virtualization, and others to build world-class solution accelerators to empower today’s IT professionals. His current projects include Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP, formerly Windows Vista Hardware Assessment), Virtualization Solution Accelerators and other incubation projects. Baldwin has more than 16 years of product management and development experience in digital e-commerce, wireless internet services and mobile computing industries and frequently speaks at technology events. Baldwin received his MBA degree from the University of Washington in Seattle and graduated from the University of Rochester with MS and BS degrees in Engineering. He and his wife Vivien enjoy traveling around the globe. He frequently blogs at: http://blogs.technet.com/MAPBLOG http://www.windowsvistablog.com http://Baldwin-Ng.spaces.live.com
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