How to handle reporting of an extreme amount of databases in SQL Server 2005?
In our shop at my previous job, we had a secondary set of servers where we tested our restores. For our busiest customers we would restore tonight's backup, mark it as read_only, and their reporting tomorrow would connect to that copy of the database for all reports from yesterday back. This offloaded about 90% of the reporting workload and doubled as a backup/restore validation method. So if most reports don't need today's data, you could consider alleviating some of the production workload this way with some cheaper hardware - if you're not using Enterprise features you could even use Express for all the databases that are &lt; 10GB. (Well, I see it's 2005, which had a lower DB size limitation, but you could always restore your copy forward into 2008/R2.) This would allow you to really distribute the databases to many low-end commodity servers (VMs or pizza boxes).