I'm new to SQL Server as well coming from an Oracle environment.  Due to the way our servers are set up I am unable to set up notification thorugh Enterprise...

Tell the "expert" it is a security risk to install services that are not going to be used.  That is why Microsoft made it optional to install or not.

I have not tried Quest Central, however I do use Embarcadero's DBArtisan.  It works cross platform for DB2, SQL Server, Oracle and Sybase.  I have used it for both Oracle...

Sorry, that is out of my range of knowledge, however I found this posting that may be useful.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=5&messageid=259180

I was having trouble initially as well.  These are the things that I had to make sure to do before it would work.

Make sure the files where you are shiping from...

The destination server name should show up on the log shipping tab for the maintenance plan of the server you are shipping from.  For example if you are shipping from...

I would apply the upgrade to B before upgrading A.  Since the HF will bring the service down you need to stop the log shipping jobs anyway.

My company is looking into VMWare also.  However we have decided not to use it on our critical applications and only on dev, test environments.  We have not implemented it...

In SQL Server 2005 it is possible to use the ROW_NUMBER function to sort data easily without a primary key.  Not sure if this was your DBA's intention, but may...