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SQL Server Health Check

Disable Unnecessary SQL Server Instances And Services

Updated October 29, 20251 min read

Written byMark Varnas

Why should you care about services that are not needed?

You may be wasting your precious resources on unused services.

It would be best if you prioritize your more critical SQL Server instance to use more resources and do not allow less important ones to take all of them.

How can I list all the SQL Server instances and services?

  1. Click Start and search for “configuration”.
  2. Open SQL Server Configuration Manager and choose SQL Server Services.
Figure 1 – SQL Server configuration manager.
Figure 1 – SQL Server Configuration Manager

Also, you can list all instances installed using the T-SQL code below.

EXEC master.sys.xp_regread @rootkey = 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE'
	,@key = 'SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server'
	,@value_name = 'InstalledInstances'

How can you fix them?

  1. Disable the SQL Server instances and services that are not used.
  2. Adjust the max memory, the threshold to parallelism, and MAXDOP settings for all instances appropriately.

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