It's all rather subjective and as usual just depends.

There are a number of problems concerning spikes and averages and the granularity you choose to plot your data will affect your...

no worries .. trying to figure out poor performing SSRS seems to be a very black art!

I suspect that largely whatever settings you choose will make little difference. Raid level, disk rotational speed and cache settings are more likely to have an impact.

The config on disks...

be aware that the sql memory options are for buffer cache and not the other various memory pools. I generally never use lock pages in memory as this allows you...

It's all a bit vague really! I have constant issues with SSRS (large) reports. I'm thinking likely an issue with the rendering - you don't say in which format you're...

I'm assuming you mean sql 2005 here as SQL 2008 is only at sp3.

service packs are cluster aware for the database engine although you'd need to do the nodes for...

yup it's a just depends question. My view is that you do what is best to achieve the end result from your database/application.

As an example I had a client where...

Like many subjects there's no magic solution and you have to figure out what works best for your organisation vs the cost and complexity.

DR and HA are different subjects anyway.

At...

In general terms a couple of million rows is small and with efficient indexes there would be no reason to do anything. Generally I'd probably partition but I don't think...

I'm going to progress it through my environments the same as patches. Hopefully if there is an issue my monitoring and/or the testers will pick it up before we...

running in SSMS isn't always the same as running from an application, the set options might be different for example.

if it's only a couple of procs why not profile to...

there's no magic answer - you should split as you suggest, possibly with the exception of indexes - but then you should monitor the activity and find out what's active....

Truthfully I doubt there will be much you can do - I too have similar issues where the business largely do as they wish - don't want a DBA until...

I have a busy system 24 hours a day so have to rebuild indexes with users present. Online rebuilds help but yes it hits the disks and the cpus,...

check out using a server side trace. In a really busy system capturing all inout can sometimes be difficult and may impact performance. Make sure you log to a drive...