Windows Hardware Assessment

Executive Summary: Use the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit to create a hardware inventory and document your computers’ configurations.

Imagine that you start a new job as an IT manager for a company with hundreds of workstations and dozens of servers to support. As you tour the facility on your first day, you see many different computers, of varying ages, from diverse manufacturers. When you get to your office, you look high and low for the records that detail these computers’ configurations and list their hardware. But you can’t find any records—because they don’t exist.

If no one ever created a record of the computers and hardware in your organization, your first order of business should be to compile one as soon as possible. Opening up individual computers and physically examining their hardware would be a monumental task. A better alternative is to use a software-based system inventory solution.

Most products that can create a network hardware inventory require the administrator to install a client or agent on each computer inventoried. This task in itself can be complicated and expensive. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is a fast, convenient, and free solution that creates a computer hardware inventory without agents. (To download the Toolkit, go to the Microsoft Download Center.)

The MAP Toolkit isn’t a complete network management solution. Its primary function is to evaluate the inventory information it gathers and use this information in a variety of assessment scenarios, mainly to determine which of the computers on a network are capable of running the latest Microsoft OSs, such as Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The Toolkit can also generate formatted reports that you can use to present this data to your colleagues or supervisors. The inventory information provides a useful snapshot of your network computers and the components inside them.

Installing the MAP Toolkit
The computer on which you install the MAP Toolkit is the one that will contact the other computers on the network to receive information about their hardware and software configurations. You can install the Toolkit on a computer running Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Vista, or Windows XP Professional with SP2 or later.

Because Windows workstation OSs are limited to ten concurrent network connections, taking an inventory of a large network can be a lengthy process. Windows server OSs support unlimited connections and are recommended for networks larger than 250 nodes. Software prerequisites include Windows .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, Windows Installer 4.5, and Microsoft Office 2007 or Office 2003 SP2. The MAP Toolkit installation will fail if these applications aren’t installed.

The MAP Toolkit software also relies on a SQL Server database to store its data. For networks of up to 20,000 computers, the software can use SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (Microsoft’s free database), which the installation program automatically downloads and installs if it isn’t already present on the system. Because SQL Server Express is limited to using 1GB of memory and can create databases no larger than 4GB, networks of more than 20,000 nodes require SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition, which you must purchase separately and run on another computer. For extremely large networks, you can install the MAP Toolkit on multiple computers and configure them all to save their data to a single SQL Server database instance. However, for networks this large, System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), Microsoft’s full-featured network management product, would generally be better choice.