Great article. It always amazes me how many people don't know about this feature. I still find servers in our infrastructure that do not have it enabled.

I have one question for you. You mention that you have a checklist for server builds. I am currently working to build one of these for our SQL team. I was wondering if you might share yours as an example I can learn from.

Also, in our environment we have server engineers that handle the OS part of server configurations. If you have a similar setup, where do you draw the line of SQL configs vs. OS configs. I have been told by my engineers that the Instant File Initialization would be an OS config, but they are not willing to add it to their checklist.

Just curious.