Can I ask, why you are considering snapshot replication and not transactional? The concern around snapshot being that your data will be completely unavailable on the subscriber as the destination...

I'm a big fan of having a standalone system that is dedicated for the housing and execution of SSIS packages. It simplifies deployments and makes management a breeze in enterprise...

I wouldn't recommend running webserver roles on your SQL boxes unless you need some of the components for specific reasons. You would have to check with your sysadmins to see...

I would take a look at the system error log and the SQL error logs to see if there was anything untowards. The SQL error log will also show you...

I don't know what the concept of a "hot standby" is and as relates to this the idea doesn't make a lot of sense.

Enterprise Edition is more than online reindexing. For example you have data compression and advanced read-ahead which can provide storage savings and performance improvements.

You should also have a word with...

Have you attempted running the report from the reportserver?

Attempt to access the report using IE locally on the reporting services server so that you can see the actual error message. Alternatively you can look at the Reporting Services...

From a clustering perspective there are no other differences between the versions, no. There are significant differences in manageability and performance that you should take into account though.

You need to be aware that running a restore verifyonly does not actually confirm you have a good backup, you can only do that with a full database restore.

I'm also...

You can't do that without opening a whole somewhere along the line. Be it running a local or remote distributor at some point you will need to have the ability...

Run

exec xp_logininfo '<domain account'

It should provide you with the information as to what group the user resides in which provides the access which will help you track things down.

A non-yielding scheduler is generally a pretty bad issue. You probably have some memory dumps in your SQL Server log directory. I would recommend contacting Microsoft support and working with...

Have you researched the SSC scripts for this? A quick search returned a stored procedure that seems to do what you require using xp_fixeddrives

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Storage+Management/76802/[/url]

It has possibly been fixed although I could not tell you what build provided that fix. I've not seen the behavior in 2008 R2 to date.