Is this infrastructure feasible to create centralized mainteinance and backup scripts and to monitor them centrally?
One of the challenges we are observing are many 3rd party applications that need a SQL server for configuration and managment data. These applications fail without a SQL server but many times they only store a few hundred MB or a handful of GB of data. These are not data warehouses. So you really have two options. Locate all of these in one cluster so if you have issues with this cluster, all these 3rd party apps begin to fail, or locate these SQL server instances alongside the applications. In our enviornment, almost 100% virtual, there is no licensing implication of sprawling SQL server instanaces. It really boils down to a management and administation issue.
Thoughts?