http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb895327.aspx
Certificates are useful because of the option of both exporting and importing keys to X.509 certificate files. The syntax for creating certificates allows for creation options for certificates such as an expiry date.
SQL Server certificates comply with the IETF X.509v3 certificate standard.
makecert
Creates certificates.
sn
Creates strong names for symmetric keys.
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However, you might be lucky and have a dedicated SAN for your SQL Server; maybe to support failover clustering perhaps. In this case it makes sense that you want to push the SAN to its limit to get the best I/O performance by whacking up the HBA Queue Depth to a much higher value. It’s a sound theory and you would assume that there is some sort of stupidly large value that might negatively affect performance. As it turns out, it’s true. However, after building a Windows Server 2008 failover cluster recently quicker than expected I had some time to test some different values and was surprised at the results which indicate that performance started to decline with an HBA Queue Depth of only 128.
I used SQLIOSim to test each configuration as I was interested in a general performance test to give me an idea of how SQL Server might perform, not a pure I/O throughput test. Here are some links on SQLIOSim you might find useful:
SQLIOSim available for download
http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2006/10/06/SQLIOSim-available-for-download.aspx
How to use the SQLIOSim utility to simulate SQL Server activity on a disk subsystem
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/231619
Understanding SQLIOSIM Output – This one is key to understanding the results!
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/kevin_kline/archive/2007/06/28/understanding-sqliosim-output.aspx
