Right... forgot about some of those things.  SQL Server Browser service would be one of the things upgraded but won't harm anything with that being upgraded.
As long as you...

Yep.  I'd do a full backup and since it is a VM, I'd do a snapshot as well.  It is a lot faster to restore from a snapshot than a...

I would install things into separate folders.  We generally install the shared stuff into the default folder (which is then separated by version) and the database files onto separate physical...

Yeah, I would agree with that.
My knowledge of the IT world comes because I worked in IT prior to moving to being a software developer (mostly web based) and...

Did you reboot the server after installing CU5?

That is a lot to bite off.  If you want basic IT, I'd recommend looking at getting your A+ certification.  If you want to specialize in servers, then I think...

One will return all of the columns and data from table1, the other will return nothing and just store the value 1 in the variable @num (presuming at least 1...

My opinion is that it depends.  Some tasks are good to do in a stored procedure or function, while others are better to do in your code.  It is a...

I could be wrong, but I am fairly certain that the data would hit server C.
Server C would be doing all of the data transforms which SSIS is usually...

You can.  That is actually how we have things running where I work.  I have SQL 2008 R2, 2012 and 2016 all running on the same box.

This may not be the most efficient method, but could you implement something like this:
DECLARE @date DATE = '2017-04-17';

SELECT
    CASE WHEN DATEPART(MONTH, @date) = DATEPART(MONTH,...

Instead of running "sp_addrolemember", try running
sp_addsrvrolemember <AD account>,'sysadmin'