SQL Server Upgrades and Migrations

The Problem: The reasons you need to upgrade

From our experience, there can be several drivers for a SQL Server Upgrade or Migration project, including but not limited to, the following:

SQL Server is not cheap to purchase – SQL Server is expensive to license, and since SQL Server 2012 the license model has changed from a ‘per processor’ to a ‘per-core’ licensing model. – in short, SQL Server and Enterprise Edition, in particular, is much more expensive than it was when SQL Server 2008 was a new and fresh technology. You might want to analyse whether you need all of those existing SQL Servers and instead reduce the number of servers and cores that you license while maintaining the compute resources, so your database performance does not suffer.
SQL Server versions have a limited shelf life, and it is possible if you have been running the same version for a long time that your version of SQL Server has gone out of support. SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 went out of support with Microsoft in July 2019. Many people are still running SQL Server 2008 R2 or earlier versions. People can be running legacy versions of SQL Server for a variety of reasons, but for those versions out of support Microsoft are no longer releasing security patches, customers might be thinking of migrating and upgrading SQL Server because of the associated security risk.
New versions of SQL Server bring with it new features and functionality that can help you ultimately deliver digital transformation within your business. It might be that you want to make use of new features that are available in later releases of SQL Server to improve application performance or more secure your data. There maybe analytical features that allow you to ‘refine’ your data and gain invaluable business insight from it. Perhaps the ‘Always-on Availability Groups’ technology used for implementing database high availability and disaster recovery, released in SQL Server 2012 is something that you want to use to help deliver a stable, reliable and protected data platform. Or it might be ‘In-Memory’ tables introduced into SQL Server 2014. Or you may want to integrate ‘R code’ inline with your SQL code, which you can do from SQL Server 2016. If you are running a legacy SQL Server version and want to use these features, and you want these features will deliver value you will need to upgrade your underlying data platform.
Are you experiencing performance and capacity issues with your legacy SQL Server environment?
Do you need DR but want to avoid the cost of a second data centre? Later versions of SQL Server will integrate with a cloud virtual machine to give resiliency off-site but without the need for a full disaster recovery site

SQL Server Upgrades and Migration Process

We have a tried and tested SQL Server upgrade and migration solution that can help you modernise your SQL Server data platform and help solve the problems listed above. At a high-level, we divide our solutions and services into three distinct areas. Allowing you to choose the exact solution that solves your problem and meets your needs. We base our model on a simple ABC approach.

A. Analyse and Design

We have a well-defined process for developing SQL Server environment and Licensing modernisation designs.

We will analyse your infrastructure to identify the SQL Servers/instances.
We will hold a design workshop to understand which Servers are in scope to understand the drivers behind the project and to determine the new target architecture.
We will audit and catalogue your SQL Server environment to be able to advise on best practice configuration, and we will monitor the SQL Server infrastructure over four weeks to help understand the current workloads and existing performance.
We will assess the workload. We will run the work Workload data through the Data Migration Assistant to check for any issues moving between different SQL Server versions
Having analysed all the information collated, we will produce environment and licensing design documents. We will consider items such as consolidation strategies based on the workload metrics collected to reduce the SQL Server footprint where appropriate. The key is to ensure that the designed solution meets the business requirements and reduces the licensing exposure to help minimise costs.
A meeting to present the design/s to answer questions, decide upon the final design and to agree on the next steps, such as the migration phase.

B. Build and Execute

Following the design phase, many of our clients engage gethynellis.com to carry out the work of migrating and modernising their SQL Server environments. During the execution phase, we will help you implement the design to upgrade and migrate your data platform. The execution phase will likely include

SQL Server install and build
Instance configuration
Security configuration and hardening
Ensure appropriate maintenance tasks exist
Move SQL Agent jobs
Replication
Lifting and shifting databases – using techniques to keep downtime to a minimum to keep the outage window as small as possible if needed.
Moving SSIS packages
Migrating Reporting Services Reports
Hyper care after the migration to ensure everything is running as expected

C. Control and Monitor

When a customer has invested in migrated and upgraded their data platform, they will likely want to keep it up and running smoothly. If your organisation has a full-time DBA, this may fall to them. In which case we are happy to hand over all the work we have done. If you have DBA in another technology or staff member who will be responsible for the data platform afterwards, we can help with any training needs they may have. If you don’t have a full-time DBA or dedicated to resource to help manage the data platform, then you can engage and utilise our data platform managed service offering, and we handle your data platform for you which will include undertaking periodic performance reviews, patching, ensuring back-ups have been successful, ensuring that security is in place and conducting regular maintenance. Alternatively, you can engage with us with a “pay as you go” support service, whereby you call off support time, as and when you need help.