>I've been given the onerous task of specing out hardware requirments for our new system--SQL Server 7.0 backend, MTS middleware, and VFP/VB frontend. The SQL Server will be the biggest, baddest mother I can buy (within reason, basically a dual 6/866 XEON with 1024MB SDRam. This should give somewhat of an idea of the size of our application. We plan to hook a transaction server directly to the SQL Server. My question is how resource intensive is transaction server (MTS) running Windows 2000? What kind of machine would I need to spec out to run our business rules? If I ran IIS on the same box, how would that affect performance? Any practical experience anyone can share in this arena would be appreciated.

Under Windows 2000, you'll run your biz objects under COM+, not MTS...but all the concepts and coding is the same.

You won't need lots of disk space, but you should get the fastest processor and most RAM you can afford. I would run SQL Server, Biz objects, and IIS on different boxes.