Talk to your license reseller before you buy any licences. Explain your situation to them including the SQL Server versions and editions you hope to use.

SQL Express may be...

Thanks for the update.

I am sure that you are looking at the legal aspects of this, but if you think the spammers might have broken a law please get the...

Someone once said 'Never put down to enemy action anything that can be adequately explained as incompetence'.

The statement 'SQL Server is dying, the future is open source' seems a bit...

You should use Cluster Manager, but instead of stopping the Cluster you should set the Cluster Groups to Offline....

Do not forget that your physical log file contains what are called virtual log files. If the VLF in use starts 14GB into your log file, then the physical...

Grant has covered the main things.

Definitely do this as a side by side upgrade. An In-Place upgrade is mainly for folks who like playing Russian Roulette.

You say...

Sorry, I should have said the install will fail if the account running the install and the machine name (not the domain name) are the same.

I have not been able...

The SQL Server install will fail if both the account running the install and domain name are the same.

Create a different account on your machine and rerun the install using...

If you want to do load balancing over multiple identical copies of a SQL Server database then you have 3 main options. All options require you to put a...

I agree with Craig.

You need to know the requirements, not try to guess them. Your guesses may be right, but if they are wrong you can easily spend time...

Put it another way... On an ADDNODE install you cannot specify the location for the SQL binaries, they always go to the system drive.

I agree it is a good idea...

There is also a KB article about disk corruption being reported on a failover if the volume was formatted using a Quick Format and you are accessing it via iSCSI.

Although...

Yes, you can put Standard Edition on a 3-node Windows cluster, but you can only install the SE SQL cluster on two of the nodes.

Alternatively you can install two instances...

There are a number of well-known businesses that run their entire public-facing web site in the cloud. Virtualisation can and does work well for SQL Server when you use...

At the very least you should look at what is needed to make a cloud migration successful for you.

I was part of the team that moved my employers systems to...