Consolidating SQL Server Environments

Consolidation is one of the most important topics nowadays in IT/Dev/Production environments.  There are a lot of options available to sysadmins, DBAs and Developers to consolidate their environments with the key one being virtualization.  For SQL Server consolidation also, there are several different options – multiple instances on a server or moving databases to a single instance for applications that share the same kind of instance requirements, using a virtualized environment etc.

Here is an excellent whitepaper on this topic from MSFT:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692366.aspx