I'm resurrecting this because it was one of the early results on google for my problem...

First, install php-mssql sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install php-mssql

Now edit freetds.conf sudo vi /etc/freetds/freetds.conf

Change the top few lines:

[global]
        # TDS protocol version
;       tds version = 8.0
;       client charste = UTF-8

Finally you should create a locales.conf file within /etc/freetds to allow correct parsing of dates with SQL Server, i have this configuration and has worked well with DateTime, DateTime2, SmallDateTime and Date data types: sudo vi /etc/freetds/locales.conf

[default]
    date format = %Y-%m-%d %I:%M:%S.%z

[en_US]
    date format = %b %e %Y %I:%M:%S:%z%p
    language = us_english
    charset = iso_1

[es_ES]
    date format = %b %d %Y %I:%M%p
    language = spanish
    charset = iso_1

[pt_BR]
    date format = %d/%m/%Y %H:%M
    language = Portuguese
    charset = iso_1

[it_IT]
    date format = %d/%m/%Y %H:%M
    language = Italiano
    charset = iso_1

Last, restart nginx sudo service nginx restart

Source: https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/general-discussion/sqlsrv-driver-on-linux/replies/14887

Check this out:
carste <- mistake
[global]
# TDS protocol version
tds version = 8.0
client charset = UTF-8