Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) 6.0 has been released and it can be downloaded from here:

• Download the MAP Toolkit 6.0

As I wrote in one of my previous articles, MAP is powerful inventory, assessment and reporting tool that can securely assess IT environments for various platform migrations and virtualization capabilities. This tool is now especially beneficial for organizations planning a move to cloud. Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 6.0 includes assessment capabilities to evaluate workloads for both public and private cloud platforms. With MAP 6.0, organizations now have the ability to identify workloads and estimate the infrastructure size and resources needed for both Windows Azure and Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track. Also, new to MAP 6.0, is an Office 365 client assessment, enhanced VMware inventory, and Oracle schema discovery and reporting. Expanded assessment and discovery capabilities from MAP help organizations simplify planning for their next migration project.

Anyhow, MAP 6.0 includes many new features and benefits:

• Windows Azure migration portfolio analysis
• Hyper-V Fast Track on boarding
• Expanded heterogeneous server environment inventory
• Office 365 readiness
• Windows Internet Explorer 9 migration assessment
• Oracle schema discovery

Analyze application portfolios for a move to the Windows Azure Platform.

For organizations considering a move to the public cloud, the application evaluation process for migration involves many tools and considerations. The MAP 6.0 Windows Azure migration portfolio analysis feature makes the process easier by providing the ability to quantify and label applications and services in an organization’s IT environment for Windows Azure migration consideration.

The Windows Azure migration portfolio analysis helps organizations:

• Catalog all of the applications in their environment
• Estimate the needed capacity to run their applications on the Windows Azure platform
• Evaluate applications based on migration difficulty
• Stack rank applications in terms of migration suitability
• Obtain a TCO-ROI analysis for the application

Accelerate private cloud planning with Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track on boarding.

Organizations can plan their private cloud with Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track on boarding, a new assessment available with MAP 6.0.This assessment provides consolidation guidance and validated configurations with preconfigured Hyper-V Fast Track infrastructures, including computing power, network and storage architectures. Get a quick analysis of server consolidation on Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track infrastructures to help accelerate planning of physical to virtual (“P2V”) migration to Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track. Each assessment also provides guidance on the next steps forward in using Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track.

Identify migration opportunities with heterogeneous server environment inventory.

MAP has expanded its heterogeneous server environment inventory to include VMware Server, vSphere and VMware vCenter. Inventory and reporting of the number of servers and guests deployed and managed by VMware infrastructure helps organizations identify migration opportunities and accelerates the migration planning process. Because SQL Server, SharePoint and Exchange run better on Hyper-V, MAP 6.0 has the added capability of identifying Microsoft workloads deployed on VMware guests.

Assess client environments for Office 365 readiness.

For organizations considering a move to the cloud with Microsoft’s award-winning business productivity solutions, MAP 6.0 can help make the planning process easier and faster. MAP 6.0 includes an Office 365 client assessment which evaluates the compatibility of Office suites deployed in their environment with Office 365, via a hardware and software readiness assessment. This assessment helps organizations quickly determine which client computers in their environment are ready to use Office 365. The tool obtains machine level detail about why a given computer is not capable of using Office 365, and identifies whether the Office suites currently being used in your environment are compatible with Office 365.

Determine readiness for migration to Windows 7 and Windows Internet Explorer 9.

Organizations can simplify their migration to Windows 7 and Windows Internet Explorer 9 with MAP 6.0. The MAP Internet Explorer migration assessment—now updated for Internet Explorer 9 migration—inventories an organization’s environment and reports on deployed web browsers, Microsoft ActiveX controls, and add-ons, and then generates a migration assessment report and proposal for easier migration to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9.

Discover heterogeneous database instances for migration to SQL Server.

MAP 5.5 included heterogeneous database inventory and reporting capability to help organizations accelerate migration to SQL Server from MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase instances. MAP 6.0 adds to this capability with Oracle schema discovery and reporting of the size and use of each schema. Reporting also provides an estimate of the complexity of migration and suggests candidates for migration to SQL Server. Organizations can use this information to determine the total cost of ownership in maintaining Oracle and the potential ROI from switching to SQL Server.

Download the MAP Toolkit 6.0

Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) 2012 beta is here and it can be downloaded from Microsoft download center. As you probably know Forefront Endpoint Protection is Microsoft endpoint security product for businesses. Microsoft also has free consumer antimalware, virus and spyware product called Microsoft Security Essentials. Ok, so coming back to Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) 2012 beta, which can now be managed using System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2012 beta which is also available for download from here.

Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012 continues to deliver on the promise of Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010, simplifying and improving endpoint protection while also greatly reducing infrastructure costs. There are also some improvements and new features in Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012 beta.

What’s new?

1. Support for System Center Configuration Manager 2012
2. Improved real-time alerts and reports
3. Role-based management
4. User-centric reports (post beta)
5. Easy migration from FEP 2010/Configuration Manager 2007
6. Support for FEP 2010 client agents

As for Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010, you’re all probably aware that Microsoft has included its licenses into Core Client Access Licence (CAL) model. So if your company already has Core CAL, you are eligible to use Forefront Endpoint Protection without additional costs.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 with SP1 can be downloaded from Microsoft download site. As you all probably know Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is actually kind of Windows Server 2008 R2 core version (command line only) with only Hyper-V role enabled. This is free version of  Microsoft command line only hypervisor, and should not be mistaken with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V which is  Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V role enabled. Hyper-V server actually comes with a lot of possible features so it can easily be used in many enterprise scenarios. Among others Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Sp1 contains following features:

1. Dynamic Memory

2. Support for RemoteFX

3. Host Clustering

4. Live Migration

5. Large Memory support (Host OS) =1TB

6. Support for up to 8 Processors (Host OS)

For all others supported features and comparisons between versions see following picture:

Download Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1.

Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 5.5 is available and can be downloaded from Microsoft site. It is really great, and free tool from Microsoft.

It is a powerful inventory, assessment and reporting tool that can securely assess IT environments for various platform migrations and virtualization without the use of any software agents.

Ok, for which scenarios can this tool be useful?

In many, many, many scenarios. Let’s see:

Agentless inventory - tool collects system resources and device information from computers in your environment. Tool doesn’t require installation of any kind of agent on computers. MAP uses technologies already available such as WMI, Remote Registry Service, Active Directory Domain Services and Computer Browser service.

Compatibility and readiness analysis – it performs analysis of hardware and device compatibility for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Office 2010. It also provides database and web application readiness for Windows Azure and SQL Azure.

Virtualization consolidation recommendation – MAP analyses servers which you plan to virtualize (P2V) and compare those results with results it collected from potential Hyper-V hosts. Based on those comparison and analysis it identifies right candidates for virtualization and suggests placing of virtual machines on physical servers.

And what’s new in version 5.5?

• Windows Azure platform assessment for easier migration to the cloud
• Heterogeneous database discovery for accelerated migration to SQL Server
• Microsoft Internet Explorer migration assessment for migration to Windows 7 compatible versions
• Enhanced server consolidation capabilities help save time and effort when creating virtualization assessments and proposals

To conclude MAP is free, very useful tool which has many great functions, and just some of them were described here. For more information see Technet.

New VHD available from Microsoft – Exchange Server 2010. Download VHD here. As you all probably know new version of Exchange 2010 has a lot of useful and cool features:

• Exchange 2010 is faster because Microsoft reduced I/O load. Hence you can use slower and cheaper disks to get great performance.
• OWA now works great in non-Microsoft browsers and on non-Microsoft platforms
• SMS – users can now send and receive SMS text messages from Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Web App
• Support for IRM in Outlook Web App - IRM-protected messages in Outlook Web App can be accessed through Windows Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (no plug-ins required)
• Voice mail transcription -  Exchange 2010 uses a speech recognition engine to automatically transcribe voice mail messages
• Much much more…

Really, there are a lot exciting features of Exchange 2010, and if you would like to try them go on and download pre-configured virtual machine (13365.4 MB).

New VHD available from Microsoft – Forefront Identity Manager 2010 Rc1. This VHD is really useful to get you going with FIM, because clean FIM installation and configuration can take pretty much time. You need to install all FIM components (and believe me, there are a lot of components), configure provisioning etc, etc.   Anyway, now with FIM 2010 VHD available for download, you can try all features:

• Provisioning of users and groups to AD
• Creating new dynamical groups
• Self service password reset
• Integration with office
• And much more…

If you are interested in identity management, grab your VHD here , create Hyper-V Virtual Machine and manage your identities.

One day I ran into one very useful and nice web site where you can find a lot of virtualized applications for download. Check it out here, and grab your virtual appliacations. On that site you can find applications for all kind of different purposes:

• Audio/Video
• Financial
• Games
• Internet
• Messaging
• Productivity
• Programming and a lot more…

So maybe you are asking yourslef, what do I do with those applications, or what are benefit of using virtualized applications. Well first using virtual appliactions can be very useful for you and your precious computer:

• Virtual applications are never installed on your OS, so they do not slow down your system (e.g big registry etc…).
• Virtual applications are in their own virtual bubble so they do not have incompatibility issues with other appliacations.
• Your registry is a lot smaller when using virtualized applications.
• Managebility of virtual applications is just great and easy.
• Virtual applications are in one way portable applications, because you can grab them on your usb key and carry them around without need for installing them.
• And a lot more benefits.

Ok, after we mentioned few benefits of virtual applications, how can you launch them on your computer, after downloading from this site? Well there is one thing you need to have and that is Microsoft Applications Virtualization Client – one tiny software which you can download as part of Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack. Of course if you  wanna use your applications with APP-V management server you will need to change one parameter in OSD file of application package, and that parameter is servername. If you don’t have management server then you can use App-V standalone mode described nicely here and here.

Hello again. I am happy to announce that Microsoft published free Windows Server 2008 R2 E-Book (with two virtualization chapters), and you can download it from here (PDF file, 11.1 MB). Book has 200 pages and following chapters :

Introduction    xvii
Chapter 1    What’s New in Windows Server R2    1
Chapter 2    Installation and Configuration: Adding R2 to Your World    9
Chapter 3    Hyper-V: Scaling and Migrating Virtual Machines    25
Chapter 4    Remote Desktop Services and VDI: Centralizing Desktop and Application Management    47
Chapter 5    Active Directory: Improving and Automating Identity and Access    65
Chapter 6    The File Services Role    91
Chapter 7    IIS 7.5: Improving the Web Application Platform    109
Chapter 8    DirectAccess and Network Policy Server    129
Chapter 9    Other Features and Enhancements    147
Index    163

Download and enjoy reading.