As a part of this initiative the company introduced the Integrated Virtualization Return on Investment (ROI) Tool designed to help customers quantify the cost advantage from deploying its virtualization offerings versus competitive solutions.

It also announced the availability of a solution accelerator called the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool to help customers automate the process of updating virtual machines, thereby allowing them to manage

“As part of our ongoing client engagements, we found that while most customers acknowledged the benefits of virtualization, they desperately sought guidance and support in understanding the actual implementation of this technology. We also observed a constant dilemma amongst customers and partners around getting a comparative view of the ROI involved in adopting virtualization solutions available in the market today. The launch of these tools is a concrete step forward from Microsoft in demystifying virtualization and helping customers experience the value of this solution today,” said Pallavi Kathuria, Director – Server Business, Microsoft India.

The ROI tool allows partners and customers to examine current production server, development/QA lab, desktop and application virtualization opportunities thereby enumerating the potential savings, service level, agility benefits and overall ROI from implementing Microsoft’s Integrated Virtualization solutions. It collects specific information about current infrastructure costs and opportunities for improvement, and then uses research by Alinean to project potential costs and benefits for various optimization strategies using the Integrated Virtualization solutions.

This tool was developed independently by ex-Gartner TCO/ROI experts at Alinean. All research was collected from the company’s ValueBase of IT spending metrics, and Microsoft product and pricing experts to reflect typical costs and savings for similar company type and size.

The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool is built on Windows Workflow Foundation and the Windows PowerShell interface to manage the workflow of updating large numbers of offline virtual machines according to their individual needs. To do this, the tool works with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 and with software update management systems (at present, either Windows Server Update Services 3.0 or System Center Configuration Manager 2007.

The tool uses “servicing jobs” to manage the update operations based on lists of existing virtual machines stored in VMM. Using Windows Workflow Foundation technology, a servicing job runs snippets of PowerShell scripts to work with virtual machines.Both the tools are available for access, free of cost on the company’s website.

Both the tools are available for access, free of cost on the company’s website.