In a previous blog post, I showed you how to use PowerShell to retrieve the details of the certificate being used for encryption-in-transit, aka TLS encryption. I have received a lot of feedback about that script and one of the most common requests was how to run it remotely. I have finally modified the script to do just that. The previous version required you to run it locally on a server. It would return the certificate information for each SQL instance that it detected. The new version can be run remotely, but it will expect you to pass in a...
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Get Certificate Details for SQL Encryption In-Transit Using PowerShell
There is an updated version of this script here. In my opinion, all customers should be encrypting connections to their SQL Servers to secure data in-transit, but that’s a discussion for another day. Today, I wanted to discuss how you can use PowerShell to lookup details on the certificate being used for that encryption. For this example, we have three SQL Server instances each configured slightly different for encrypted communication. Using the SQL Server Configuration Manager, we can see the first instance is configured to use a certificate named “deathstar.govlab.corp (SHA256)”. The FORCE ENCRYPTION option is set to YES to...
Continue reading...Finding the NTFS Allocation Unit Size for Mount Points
The 64Kb Allocation Unit size is one of the easiest SQL Server best practice items to complete during your new builds, but from time to time, I still see this one overlooked. And I know this topic has been beat to death over the years, so we are not going to cover the why you should format volumes using 64Kb Allocation Size. We are just going to cover how to check the current value. In our setup, we have a server with 4 disks attached; two are mounted with drive letters (M: and S:) and two are mounted as folders...
Continue reading...SQL Server Morning Health Checks – UPDATED!!!
A while back I wrote an article about how I created a PowerShell script for a customer to help them with their morning routine of checking the health of each SQL Server in their environment. I have not worked with that customer in a good while, but I thought it would be useful to update the script with some additional checks. The original script helps the DBA answer these questions: What is the uptime of each SQL Server? What is the status of each database? What is the status of each Availability Group? What is the backup status of each...
Continue reading...SQL Server Morning Health Checks
Every now and again as a Microsoft PFE, you get a chance to make a big difference for a customer. One such occasion happened just recently when I was asked to help find a way to automate the daily checks the DBA had to perform every morning. The result was a PowerShell script that reduced that manual task down from an hour to less than a minute. You can read the full article here on MSDN. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/samlester/2017/12/29/sql-server-dba-morning-health-checks/ The PowerShell script can be downloaded from here. https://github.com/PatrickKeisler/SQLMorningHealthChecks
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