I'm trying to come up with some good ways of centrally managing several SQL Server instances potentially spread over several physical boxes and virtual machines.
One thing that is often useful is a set of common stored procedures and functions. You could think of this as analagous to a dll used my many applications. I can see a place for both a general functional library (for things like splitting strings on commas, a table of integers, a calendar table, etc) as well as an administration library (for things like index maintenance, backups, etc). Often these routines cannot be called from anything but the local instance due to the nature of the operations involved, so they must be created on each instance.
It would obviously be advantageous to ensure the consistency of these libraries across the servers that might make use of them. A database on each instance to contain the procedures and functions (a Library database) could have a dba schema and a dev schema containing the appropriate objects. This database could be created and modified on a single server and then the objects pushed to all other instances by way of replication, ensuring all library databases are always up to date and in synch.
Does anyone use a model like this? Does anyone have another suggestion for the management of shared functionality over multiple instances?