How important is separation to you when deploying IIS SQL and Team Foundation Server

Rob Caron works for Microsoft Corp. and he's looking for your feedback regarding how important you view separation between IIS, SQL and Team Foundation Server. For those who haven't heard of Team Foundation Server(TFS) it's a part of the upcoming Visual Studio 2005 release. TFS is designed to enable development teams (of more than five people) to effectively collaborate throughout the Software Development Lifecycle(SDL). You can still use Visual Studio on it's own if you wish - clearly this makes sense for lone developers or perhaps small teams. TFS is a powerful tool when used in large teams as it enables developers testers project managers and stakeholders to work together and to avoid surprises.

Technically speaking TFS uses SQL as a data store and exposes it's interfaces via IIS and Sharepoint.

Rob's interested to learn from you as to the significance of recommending deploying the components in isolation on multiple machines (physical or virtual)versus integrated deployment. Clearly there are benefits from a security perspective of separation but clearly this increases the cost/resource requirements.

Please browse to Rob's post to find out more and express your views. Feel free to add comments to this post too.