Auditors gathering SQL Server licensing data should start with Active Directory to identify active devices, then pull inventory from SCCM or ServiceNow for edition and version info. Capture processor and core counts for each machine, and for virtual environments, map guests to hosts and note hypervisor settings. Incomplete data or misidentifying active assets are common mistakes that lead to audit errors.
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So there's about 10 steps to do an ELP.
We're only going to talk about a couple of them. I'm going to go through what the steps are today, but the first step here is actually to go and get the data. So I'm going to talk high level about the data that you have to go and get.
So the first step is to go get Active Directory. And with Active Directory you're going to be looking for a couple of things. What you want to do is find out. You want to find active devices. So you're going to be looking for enabled versus disabled accounts. You may be finding things in there like server states.
In other words, is it a production.
Or non production environments, Dr. Etc. That's the first step. Go get Active Directory and do some things with it. Now the process to get to what is actually active is somewhat art, somewhat science.
I'm not going to dive into that today.
But that is definitely something that when you're looking at things you need to understand.
How do I tell if these devices are actually active? You know, do I look at a number of days since last login? Maybe that works for desktops, maybe it doesn't for servers.
You know, there's a bunch of things.
That go into this.
The second piece that you require is inventory, right? And so typically most organizations have a.
Source of inventory today. Whether that's something like SCCM, whether it's ServiceNow, Discovery, Altira success when it comes to inventory. What am I going to go out and get? I need to get the device name, I need to get.
We're talking SQL Server.
So I need the SQL Edition and.
Version, I need the installation context.
Is it physical, is it virtual?
It's probably a few other things that I probably should have put on here.
Like number of processors, number of cores.
Number of vcores, those sorts of things. The next thing I need to go out and get is virtualization information. So I'm going to talk about VMware.
But it could be hyper V, could be other things here. I need to go out and I need to get guest to host mapping. So I need to know what host.
Server the guest relies on, what cluster.
It'S in, any of those host processor and core counts.
There are a few settings that I'll probably want to look at inside of VMware.
