Forget SatNav - Use MAPs

OK, tenuous link I admit, but recently Microsoft have released version 5.0 of MAP (Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit). If you haven’t used it before then you really should as it makes a breeze of certain elements of your documentation, this is what Microsoft say about it:

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an agentless tool designed to simplify and streamline the IT infrastructure planning process across multiple scenarios through network-wide automated discovery and assessments. MAP performs an inventory of heterogeneous IT environments and provides you with usage information for SQL Server and servers in the Core CAL Suite, Windows 2000 Server migration assessment, SQL Server 2008 discovery and assessment for consolidation, and a readiness assessment for the most widely used Microsoft technologies including Windows 7, Office 2010, and Windows Server 2008 R2.  MAP also provides server virtualization scenarios to help you identify underutilized resources and the hardware specifications needed to successfully consolidate your servers using Microsoft Hyper-V technology.

What does this mean for DBA’s? It means you have a free to use GUI discovery tool at your finger tips whenever you need it that goes well beyond SQL discovery tools that offered by other third parties as it will also discover information about servers and workstations on your domain. Did I mention that it’s free?

MAPs can create an inventory on any/all of  the technologies listed below:

and most importatntly:

Above and beyond this you are able to create a comprehensive data analysis of these technologies which will provide you with a list of hardware used by the machines running the technologies as well as the service packs that they are running on.

Using these details you can create a useful picture of your SQL estate and can immediately see if there are any servers that require patching making you more proactive than reactive.

If this were not enough then MAPS also ships with a software usage tracker that you can use to true up your licences when Microsoft ask for your licensing details.

It really is an awesome piece of software that will save you hours of work if you needed to do it manually. The only downside that I have found is that it will do is install a named Express instance of 2008 R2 called MAPS which was a bit of a surprise, it would have been nice to have been able to create a new database on my local instance, but such is life.

To download and find more information on how MAPS can make your like easier go to: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd537566.aspx