I've checked the resources at Microsoft TechNet, MSDN and Bing but I’m not aware of any information regarding the best practice about the configuration for the "Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application" service role on SharePoint Server 2010.
We are planning a farm spanning to datacenters running 8 SharePoint servers + 2 SQL servers. Currently we are running a SharePoint 2007 with 6 servers and two are using Windows Server Network Load Balancing (NLB) to maintain high-availability. The SharePoint 2010 farm will is planed the same way. Two of the 8 servers (all SharePoint full install) will be running in a NLB configuration. Two servers will be using for FAST search and will also need the "Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application" because we will use the HOSTS file to redirect the traffic to the local box, so the web front end server don't get any extra load from search. The remaining 4 servers will be used to host application roles like office web apps, metadata, ...
The question is now: Should i stop the "Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application" on the 4 remaining servers because they will never serve any content from the planed web applications?
If i remove the role, the IIS configuration is getting a lot more lightweight on the server. It feels cleaner. The current environment is only hosting the "Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application" role on the WFE, but we had some 3rd party solutions that had problems during setup.
A general information is provided in the following MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768569.aspx