Does Win 2012 Standard Edition support clustering of SQL 2012 Enterprise Edition

Assuming that there is no resource over-commitment, reservations aren't going to get you a whole lot.

You need to track down what the cause of the slowdown is.

What is observed is that the VMs seem to spool down and we get lags in response.

What you need to do is find out what resources are causing this. Also "spool down" isn't really a description of anything. You need to do some digging into performance monitoring and see what's causing this.

*is it a good idea to run the SQL server and the IIS server on the same host? They are the only two VMs on it. The host is a new Dell R620 with 192 gb mem.

If you have two VMs that communicate a lot and generate a lot of I/O, it's a good idea to have them on the same host, but separate volumes/LUNs. Doing this will allow all network traffic between the two to stay on the vSwitch and never touch your physical networking infrastructure. There can be pretty decent performance improvements this way.

You should keep them on separate LUNs, because you don't want disk contention.

TL;DR - Profile your app. Find out where the bottleneck is. Reservations only matter if you have resource contention. There's no point in setting up reservations as a diagnostic measure, you need to do your diagnostics first and then worry about that if it's appropriate.

I learned that installing Enterprise Edition locally is a bad idea... thus I tried:

• removing everything related to SQL server with "programs and features"
• deleteing all files related to SQL server from Program files (and Program files (x86))
• Installing SQL 2012 Express

SQL Browser service still failed to start, thus failed to install.

I found this article which led me to believe I had an interfereing proxy of some kind... sure enough! I removed Covenant Eyes (a content filtering service) from my computer, and tried to reinstall SQL Server Express and the browser service installed correctly. Still a handful of other things failed to install (Database Engine Services, Full-Text and Semantic Extractions for Search, SQL Server Replication, Reporting Services - Native), but the browser service is working!

If you are having this issue as well, check for interference from filters/proxies/virus scanners/etc..

UPDATE:

I got the other 4 things (that failed to install) working by going to "Programs and Features" > removing just those features and reinstalling them. I ran into these helpfuls questions along the way: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2979425/sql-server-installation-what-is-the-installation-media-folder

If you get the error

Rule "Reporting Services Catalog Database File Existence" failed

or

Rule "Reporting Services Catalog Temporary Database File Existence" failed

Go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL<version#>.<instance_name>\MSSQL\DATA and delete the report server files.

• ReportServer.mdf
• ReportServer_log.LDF
• ReportServerTempDB.mdf
• ReportServerTempDB_log.LDF.

http://www.sqlcoffee.com/Troubleshooting028.htm