>I think the big unknown is how much local caching of data a VFP app does. You might find that if most of your operations are reads (and I would guess they are) that local caching might be quite effective and not much data may go across the wire.

Most of our operations contains at least one write in one of our 200 tables. I have two servers connected at 100mb and when one does a query on the other, I can see the difference as oppose to have the query to be executed on the data server.

For the specific environment that this will be upgraded, we will triple the application server power. So, that will allow that specific installation to remain without the actual setup. But, I guess when time will come to optimize it again, assuming the server in place would be still the best available, we would then have to go to server routing, moving the data into a data server, and moving the data to client/server.