The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit makes it easy to assess your current IT infrastructure for a variety of technology migration projects. This Solution Accelerator provides a powerful inventory, assessment, and reporting tool to simplify the migration planning process. It is one of many solution accelerators from Microsoft. Solution Accelerators are free, scenario-based guides and automations designed to help IT Professionals who are proactively planning, deploying, and operating IT systems using Microsoft products and technologies. Solution Accelerator scenarios focus on security and compliance, management and infrastructure, and communication and collaboration.

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) is an agentless, automated, multi-product planning and assessment tool for quicker and easier desktop, server and cloud migrations. MAP provides detailed readiness assessment reports and executive proposals with extensive hardware and software information, and actionable recommendations to help organizations accelerate their IT infrastructure planning process, and gather more detail on assets that reside within their current environment. MAP also provides server utilization data for Hyper-V server virtualization planning; identifying server placements, and performing virtualization candidate assessments.

“This is a great tool for scanning your existing infrastructure to collecting inventory and performance data in order to determine what servers or services can take advantage of savings provided by moving them to Azure Cloud Services.”

With Windows Server 2003 End of support right around the corner, it is very important that we understand what we have and what needs to be done to maintain a viable infrastructure!” Using the tool is a very easy and almost self evident process:

I) Download and Install the tool
II) Collect inventory Data
III) Collect Performance Data
IV) Review Reports

To make deployment and reporting super simple for you, I will create the step by step process for running on your infrastructure. These steps were created by installing the bits into a Windows Server 2012 server running in a virtual machine on my infrastructure. You can do this for converting from AWS by simply running the tool and including servers and services that are hosted on AWS or other hosted providers.

I) Step By Step – Download and Install Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit

Download the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=313396 (you may have to add http://microsoft.com and/or http://download.microsoft.com to your trusted zone)
Run the MAPSetup.exe program.
- on Welcome Screen just click Next
- Accept License Agreement click Next
- The default install location will be “C:Program FilesMicrosoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit” just keep the default and click Next
- You can just click Next on the CEIP screen (change it fi you like to do not join, but it does help Microsoft make the products better 🙂
- Click Install
- Click Yes on the User Access Control screen
- Once it is done just click Finished
- The installation will put an icon on your start screen. Just click the Window button and select Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit
- Another UAC prompt. Click Yes
- An SQL database is needed to store all the data we will be collecting. On the Data Source screen, we are just giving the DB a name. Type in whatever you like for the name and click OK. In my case, I simply typed MAP for the name. You can optionally put a description in as well.
- You can browse around the application now.

II) Step By Step – Perform Inventory

There are many places that link to the “Collect Inventory Data” for simplicity, we will launch it from the Overview screen. Click “Perform an inventory” which will open the Inventory and Assessment Wizard.
- feel free to choose whatever options you want to use for your data collection. As a minimum you will want to collect Windows Server, SQL Server, SQL Server with Database Details and Windows Azure Platform Migration.
- Choose your Discovery Methods. ActiveDirectory is the easiest but if you would rather use a different method, just check it. then click Next
- Put in your credentials then click Next
- Keep the default for find all computers in all domains, containers, and organizational units and click Next
- If you selected multiple methods for connecting you may have to create additional credentials. Otherwise, just click Next
- If you have multiple credentials, you can link them to the service that will be scanned. If not, just click Next
- for Connection Properties, you can just click Next
- on the summary screen click Finish
- While the scan is running you can click Details to see additional information
- once completed you can click Close.
- if you happen to click close before it is done, you can reopen the task viewer by clicking the down arrow next to the circle in the lower left corner of the screen and select View progress…
- You can now browse through the application to see your results.
- You can also take a preliminary look at the Windows Azure Readiness by clicking on Cloud, double clicking on Windows Azure VM Readiness then under options Generate Windows Azure VM Report.

III) Step By Step – Collect Performance Data

From the Cloud section (or any section really) select “Collect performance Data” to launch the wizard to collect performance data.
- Select Windows-based machines and if you have Linux go ahead and select those as well. Enter or select the end date/time of your scan. For my simple test I did an hour. If you have a pretty static workload this is fine. If your workload changes or you want a better sampling go ahead and select whatever Date/time you would like to finish the data collection then click Next
- Choose the computers from a list on the next step of the wizard. click Next
- You can then select all the computers you want to collect performance data on then click Next. Notice there is a search box if you have a long list it is easy to find individual servers.
- you can create different credentials for this scan if you need to. Otherwise, just click Next
- You have the option of mapping credentials in case you have multiples. Click Next
- On the summary page, notice that “Remote Registry” service must be running on the computers. Click Finish and your collection will begin.
- If you have failures it is likely because the credentials you supplied are not sufficient or remote registry is not enabled. Click Closed when finished.

IV) Step By Step – Review Data / Report

We have now successfully collected inventory and performance data. We see what machines are ready to be ported to Azure VMs and we have some that we also have sizing data available. You can drill down on these numbers by double-clicking on them.
- After you drill down (double-click) on the Windows Azure VM Readiness scenario you will see a Generate Windows Azure VM Readiness Report. Go ahead and click it. This will download an Excel report.
- After you drill down (double-click) on Windows Azure Virtual Machine Capacity you can see how many of what size machines which can be used to accurately estimate the cost of moving that workload to Windows Azure. There is also a link on the bottom of the screen to the Windows Azure VM Pricing Calculator. You can get additional details by opening the “Generate Windows Azure VM Capacity Report”. This report is an excel document of the results.
- Summary
- Sizing Results
- Current Machine Utilization which includes:Machine Name, Operating System, Machine Type, CPU, Logical Processors, System Memory (MB), Disk Size (GB), Active Network Adapter, IP Address, CPU Utilization (%), Memory Utilization (MB), Disk I/O, Utilization (IOPS), Disk Space Utilization (GB), Network Utilization-Out (MB/s), Network Utilization-In (MB/s)
- More tabs available in Excel Report