License inventory for a large SQL Server database infrastructure

Here’s a new entry to our series of posts on how the ABCloudz team has helped a large pharmaceutical company manage its sophisticated data infrastructure. The customer’s business is rapidly growing, which leads to a significant expansion of their data infrastructure. This infrastructure has exceeded 140 SQL Servers united by complex connections and ETL scripts. In such conditions, making all databases efficient and consistent became a challenge.

The customer decided to organize and upgrade all SQL Servers and the rest of their infrastructure to the newest versions. This would make all infrastructure parts run smoothly and consistently, which would improve their system productivity dramatically. Besides, such infrastructure consistency would make further upgrades, such as planned migration to the Azure cloud, much simpler. In such a large data infrastructure, the customer needed to track software versions and licensing.

They wanted an experienced technical team to help them with the license inventory. That’s when ABCloudz came into action. The customer selected ABCloudz to complete this complex assignment because they already had a very positive experience cooperating with our team in the past. The client was very confident that ABCloudz possessed strong technical expertise and implemented efficient custom practices in database management.

Database inventory module from the ABCloudz team

To help the customer track their licenses and software versions, our team created a database inventory module. It was integrated with a database monitoring tool that we developed to ensure 24/7 infrastructure support. The module stores all the data about licensing and software versions in the monitoring tool’s database. The job runs every day at 1 AM PST to collect basic parameters of all servers such as information about the servers’ health and interactions within the environment.

Dynamic reports for future database consolidation

All data collected by our inventory module is displayed in a dynamic report. The report shows system administrators the information on new software versions and runs comparison of these versions to the current software version on which the database infrastructure runs. As a result of this automated analysis, the report displays patching and upgrade suggestions. The report is dynamic, so it gets updated with each daily entry from the inventory module.

Database double-check with a Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit

Our inventory module provides the most important information on software versions and licensing. However, it has some limitations. Automated tools cannot access all parts of the infrastructure because of its strong security safeguards and encryption protocols. Besides, the customer database consolidation plans required our support team to conduct a detailed and comprehensive annual inventory to double-check the entire database and its readiness to strategic Azure migrations.

Therefore, once a year, we double-check the customer’s database with an additional toolkit that involves Microsoft Assessment Tool. This process is a semi-manual activity.

• At first, Microsoft Assessment Tool collects basic data on migration capabilities for servers, dependencies, potential software upgrades, and licensing issues.
• The next step involves a manual review of those parts that are not accessible to the Microsoft Assessment Tool.

We contribute to the customer’s consolidation plan

Our practices provided vital information to the customer’s consolidation plan. This plan involves:

• The upgrade of all SQL Servers 2012 to the 2019 version.
  Gradual migration of all their infrastructure to the Azure cloud (that’s why Microsoft Assessment Tool is so relevant).
• Numerous migrations which occur once per month during the downtime window that is taken by infrastructure administrators for its maintenance and update. Usually, we migrate a couple of servers during the second or the third week of a month.
• An important point is that some end-of-support SQL Servers are still running in exceptional cases. It goes about specific application owner demands. This may happen due to a specific application owner demands. Some apps have legacy infrastructure that has poor compatibility with newer versions of SQL Server, and their complete upgrade is not the customer’s top priority. For this reason, the customer deliberately keeps them running on end-of-support software.

Database inventory solutions that fit your specific needs

We helped the customer organize database inventory according to their consolidation plans. This inventory tool was perfectly integrated into their database monitoring system that ensures 24/7 data infrastructure support and maintenance. It is even more important that we can easily tailor our practices and approaches implemented in this project to the needs of any customer. Contact us now to know how we can take your database monitoring to the next level.