In our current infrastructure we have several clients that have their own SharePoint farm hosted on dedicated WFE's and a dedicated SQL Server instance.
We are thinking of moving our hosting to another provider who have proposed an architecture whereby all the SharePoint Databases for our SharePoint Farms reside on a single instance of clustered SQL Server.
At the moment we have 15+ SharePoint farms and this number will grow rapidly in the near future. We envisage having 100's of clients.
For reasons specific to the nature of our application we have concluded that it is not feasible for us to have more than one client on the same WFE so each client will always have their own dedicated WFE(s).
The question I would like to ask is that is it feasible (in a production environment) to have several or 100's of SharePoint Farms to utilise a single instance of SQL server no matter how powerful it (the box) is? Would like to hear from anyone who has seen things implemented in this way and what their experience was?
I have concerns over performance. In addition to this there is the obvious risk of having all your clients depending on a single instance of SQL Server.
I will be grateful if you can advise on the pro's and cons and based on that your opinion on this approach. Does Microsoft have anything to say on this? I have researched this a bit and have not found anything.
Thanks for your help in advance.