>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.

First off, this question would probably get a better answer on Rick's board at www.west-wind.com.

I don't have experience with anything as high volume as what it sounds like you are building, but I can tell you that, for security purposes, you should probably run IIS and your business object on one box, and keep your data on another machine.