There are a number of KB articles about the missing perfmon counters - it's a real pain, especially on a cluster, as the counters may just not be there.

There...

I assume you're making an rpc call?  e.g.  exec server.master.dbo.xp_fixeddrives ?

I don't see any issues between 2003 and 2k based sql servers.

Using QA can you run an sp_who on your...

stopping and starting services out of Cluster admin will cause a failover.

any interruption to the network connections including heartbeat.

putting msdb in dbo only mode can cause problems.

losing a san drive...

As noted above for SQL server in a clustered environment you must add the disk to the dependent resources for SQL Server. You should not have to fail over the...

assuming you leave a reasonable amount of free space in your mdf file the shrink shouldn't fragment the tables - however you may find it beneficial to reindex all your...

It could make sense - there's quite a tight relationship between disks, memory and cpu. In a sense I could imagine cpu dropping - as by limiting memory you could...

Ah well that's a whole new ball game!! Performance monitoring / trending is a different matter really - it's something I do but you need a history of data to...

yup that's the one - ours comes from NET IQ who I think have sold it on to Idera. Reports are available from the drop down lists under the server...

active / active clusters are ok in as much as they provide a failover route without redundent hardware, but you do need redundent resource, and this isn't multiple instances anyway.

Beware...

SQL Diagnostic Manager, was SQL Probe, and is on its thrid owner now, is one of the best tools I've seen and one I've used for the last 6 odd...

well I don't wish to appear negative but checking for a lock that has been held for 5 to 10 mins might not be very efficient. I do a similar...

I think that sometimes the exclusion of cursors is over emphasised, I've seen some wonderful ( and horribly inefficient ) code to avoid cursors that takes much longer and creates...

One of the downsides of the maint plans is when they fail, which they often will, the best error you tend to get is  "sysmaint.exe failed"  not very helpful !

It's...

I agree about not getting into cursor arguments and set arguments.

Not all data operations are set based, in these cases where row by row processing is required then the use...

try a while loop - works for me <grin >