SQL Agent cannot run as part of SQL Express. This is normal.

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Eventually you must install it on both nodes. If you don't, what happens when you have an outage and you fail back to the unpatched node? You can have...

I have not seen a condition like that before -- can you look in that bootstrap location to see if there are any errors in either a summary.txt or a...

I don't think Local System is going to work. I have had to use Network Service in order for that to work. Better overall is a domain account...

Can you browse to the <root>\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\120\Setup Bootstrap\Log area of the server and look for a Detail.txt? There should be a clearer error message in there somewhere.

Enterprise in dev aside, there are a few things to check -- 1) you cannot add features during an upgrade, you can only upgrade what's already there. Make sure you...

No matter what you will have down time briefly for the failovers, at least once in an active/passive setup, and multiple times for active/active. If all goes well, the...

We did this for a series of conversions of remote site from SQL 2000 to 2012. We could not move DBs down the WAN but we had to do...

Your analysis looks correct. Given your requirements, I cannot think of a better solution out of the box than log shipping, and it should do everything you want. ...

Trust me, you do not want to back up to a UNC path. Not only is it far slower (as you have seen) but it is far less reliable....

If you can account for all of your code and this doesn't exist, you may be safe. In a case like this I will never say you WILL be safe,...

Yep there is. If DBO = sa as is the case in many cases, and trustworthy is on, what if you have a procedure set to execute as owner...

Are you sure you need more than 8? Are you seeing slowdowns in tempdb with 8 files anyway? I have yet to see an install that truly benefited from...

Agreed -- if the hardware and versions are the same, the data layout has to be different. I'd check fragmentation and stats on all affected indexes as that will...