Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.

The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review period will run through July 5th.

To download the beta materials on Connect follow this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219165

To join the beta review program follow this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=171065

The new features introduced in version 7.0 include Windows Server 2012 Beta readiness assessment, VDI readiness assessment and the ability to plan for virtualization assessment of Linux server.

MAP 7.0 supports SQL Server 2012 discovery and migration planning and, along with Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter, simplifies the migration of VMware virtual machine to Hyper-V.

Key features and benefits of MAP 7.0 Beta help you:

• Understand your readiness to deploy Windows in your environment with hardware and device readiness assessments
• Determine Windows Server 2012 Beta readiness
• Investigate how Windows Server and System Center can manage your heterogeneous environment through VMware migration and Linux server virtualization assessments
• Size your desktop virtualization needs for both Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and session-based virtualization using Remote Desktop Services
• Ready your information platform for the cloud with the SQL Server 2012 discovery and migration assessment
• Evaluate your licensing needs with usage tracking for Lync 2010, active users and devices, SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 Beta

Labels: Capacity Planning, Microsoft, Release

Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.

vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric applications on VMware cloud infrastructure and SQLFire Enterprise Edition, an in-memory distributed SQL database that will enable application data to meet cloud scale with the needed performances.

vFabric Suite leverages Spring development framework, inherited from SpringSource acquisition in 2009, vFabric application services and a per-VM licensing model to provide a comprehensive infrastructure oriented to the deployment of cloud-ready applications.

Part of this broader shift in application infrastructure was the move to cloud and application deployment on virtual infrastructure. Traditional application servers simply weren’t designed, optimized or licensed for this new world. These legacy systems are too cumbersome, too costly, and definitely not cloud-ready. We saw the need for a new breed of application infrastructure to support this new world of applications.

said Jerry Chen, vice president, Cloud and Application Services, VMware.

CONTINUE READING ON CLOUDCOMPUTING.INFO…

Labels: vFabric, VMware

On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.

One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long seven-part video series, was the need to increase the automation and integration between VMware’s various products, topic about which Herrod reassured those present confirming VMware’s awareness of the problem.

Of this long speech the statement that has inflamed internet is

VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite is really more of a marketing term. Those of you know our products deeply know that they don’t fit this well together as they need to. Some of them have multiple databases, some don’t look the same, some install differently, and what I can’t stand that is Site Recovery Manager doesn’t currently work with vCloud Director. So, what we are basically able to say is that we created and acquired companies that led to a lot of individual products that don’t work well enough together yet.

as reported by Dave Northey on Microsoft’s TechNet blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Re-inserted in the context and completed with the last assertion

So a huge focus for the company is really how we make it become a suite.

as cleverly noted David Marshall in his article, this confirm the awareness of VMware and the will to solve the problem, as mentioned before.

What Herrod said simply describes the reality of a company that has acquired a variety of technologies from different companies and now is struggling to reunite them together in one or more suites, what we can certainly say is that the new position of prominence of vCOPS and the new integrations provided by VMware’s partners are a signal of a new path towards the light.

Labels: VMware