SQL will use only the memory it needs up to the max server memory you set. The entire db can fit into memory if it's only 35GB. Is the server...

Task manager does not display memory usage correctly for SQL Server. Look at the perfmon counter SQLServer:Memory Manager Total Server Memory(KB) for the actual amount of memory SQL is using.

I believe this white paper from the SQL CAT team is exactly what you are looking for. It discusses setting up log shipping in conjunction with mirroring. Pages 4-6 should...

The following will pull every plan from the plan cache:

SELECT * FROM sys.dm_exec_cached_plans cp CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(cp.plan_handle);

GO

Reference from BOL:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189747.aspx

This might be a starting point for what you are after.

Don't forget to rebuild your indexes after the shrink operation as they will likely be fragmented.

I believe the limiting factor is the transaction log size of the principal database. Meaning if the mirror is down for a long enough period of time the tran log...

I'm assuming your account has permissions to start/stop services on the machine which is why it works when you run it manually. Make sure the SQL Agent account has permissions...

Yes, you can use a VM for all 3.

As George stated, there is no restart needed. To set max memory at 20GB:

EXEC sys.sp_configure N'max server memory (MB)', N'20480'

GO

RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

GO

Also AWE does not need to be enabled on...

You can still host the report server databases a SQL 2005 server and use reporting services 2008. From the article below:

Choose the Database Engine instance to use. SQL Server 2008...

After the reboot performance will likely be degraded as SQL reads pages off disk and into the buffer cache.

You can see what MAXDOP is set at for the server by running the following:

sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1;

GO

sp_configure 'max degree of parallelism'

or in SSMS you can right click the...

You could add additional data files to the Primary filegroup such as:

ALTER DATABASE [mydatabase] ADD FILE

( NAME = N'mydatabase2', FILENAME = N'C:\mydatabase2.ndf' ,

SIZE = 102400KB , FILEGROWTH...

Possibly for database recovery. I noticed after a log backup the entries disapear and databases in simple recovery don't retain the entries.

Glad you got it working. I was just about to supply a simple example. This is if you are using a default instance and not a named instance.

EXEC master.dbo.sp_addlinkedserver