14 DAY TRIAL // Customers leveraging the next iteration of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit will be able to perform inventory assessments of not only Microsoft platforms and third-party virtualization assets in their environment, but also of additional technologies, especially open source solutions. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 5.0 is built with heterogeneous environments in mind, being able to produce inventory assessments not just for Microsoft software, but also for products such as Linux. A member of the MAP team tested MAP Toolkit 5.0 Beta 2 and offered an insight into the Solution Accelerator’s capabilities.
“With MAP 5.0, the Solution Accelerator Team has extended the heterogeneous environment discovery though the inventory and assessment of various flavors of Linux OS environments. We further augmented the Hybrid platform assessment with application discovery of LAMP stack,” the MAP team representative added.
But the next major version of MAP is one part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to customers running mixed source environments. In this particular case, a solution initially set up to streamline migration to new Microsoft technologies has evolved in response to customer needs to include assessment inventory capabilities for non-Microsoft installations.
“In addition to the LINUX OS inventory assessment reports, the MAP Toolkit provides an application summary worksheet for the LAMP stack. This worksheet describes applications (Apache, MySQL and PHP) discovered through the inventory process and provides the instances, version details, and a count of the number of times a particular version of the software was found,” the MAP team member said.
MAP can be leveraged in a variety of scenarios, from planning, to streamlining an environment to consolidation and to migrations. Going beyond Windows Servers to Linux and LAMP, MAP Toolkit 5.0 Beta produces a Machine Inventory Results Report and a Hardware and Software Summary Report, offering deep insight into an organization’s assets.
