SQL2008 / IIS7 / ASP.NET Application

Hope you all had a great Christmas and New Years, and hopefully 2009 will be a good one...

In my case that probably equates to looking at how to save money for my business. So I have a MS SQL 2005 and IIS ASP.NET application which is currently being hosted for testing using MSDN subscription licenses. Essentially the architecture looks like:

Customers (web browsers) <-> FireWall <-> [IIS7 Guest VM] <- vlan -> [SQL2005 Guest VM]
_user session<--------- http & https only --> web application  <-odbc only ->

To license this and put it into production at co-location is going to be expensive due, mainly, to the SQL licensing requirements, right? i.e. that SQL2005 VM is going to need per processor or server license for £2500+

So, can I replicate my architecture using web wiz services without putting the ASP.NET/IIS7 application on the same machine as the SQL server?

I need to make sure our application will work properly on SQL 2008 but I think it will. Any recommendations if I DID put the ASP.NET/IIS7 application on the SQL2008 box too?

Security is also a significant issue as the database will contain some financial information (which was why I had them separated in the test environment).

With interest,

sk

Our servers are setup with web and database server suppurate from each other, mainly for performance reasons.

In your case though for higher security I would place the IIS 7 and SQL Server on the same server. This way you can use a trusted connection to the SQL Server and not have TCP/IP enabled giving much higher security and you can lock down SQL Server to a local trusted connection only.

The limits of SQL Server 2008 Express are very high and I doubt you would ever hit these limits in a web environment. There is also the newer SQL Server 2008 Web Edition which is available at an extremely modest cost.

If you wanted to discus the security setup of our servers then I would suggest that you contact us as a public forum is not the ideal place to be discussing security aspects of our network.