SQL Server Instancing: Should I use multiple instances or databases?

Posted by Spence on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Spence
Published on 2009-07-11T11:38:03Z Indexed on 2010/03/12 1:17 UTC
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sql-server

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instances

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Performance

I have a reasonable server connected to a SAN which will be running SQL servers for multiples of the same application.

There are no security issues with one application being able to read anothers database.

We are unfortunately in 32 bit windows as well.

I'm of the opinion that it would be better to use one instance on the server, enable AWE so that the server instance can use almost all of the ram we have and then run each of the databases in the one instance.

However I've been overruled by the gods of the IT department on this one, so I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this. From a performance point of view, am I incorrect that one instance of SQL is better than two?

I know that we could do some failover stuff, but doing that on one blade only seems like overkill to me..

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