Today I learnt something new…

Of course a Standard Edition Deployment cannot have co-located Databases on the Front End, if you wanted to add the Monitoring role or other database roles you would need full blown SQL elsewhere.What I learnt was that you can collocate each of the following databases on a single database server:

• Monitoring database
• Archiving database
• Persistent chat database
• Persistent chat compliance database
• A back-end database for an Enterprise Edition Front End pool

You can collocate any or all of these databases in a single SQL instance or use a separate SQL instances for each, with the following limitations:

• Each SQL instance can contain only a single back-end (RTC) database (for an Enterprise Edition Front End pool), single Monitoring database, single Archiving database, single persistent chat database, and single persistent chat compliance database.
• The database server cannot support more than one Enterprise Edition Front End pool, one server running Archiving, one server running Monitoring, single Persistent Chat database, and single Persistent Chat compliance database, but it can support one of each, regardless of whether the databases use the same instance of SQL Server or separate instances of SQL Server.

WARNINGAlthough collocation of databases is supported, the size of the databases can grow quickly. For example, when you consider collocating the Archiving database with other databases, be aware that if you are archiving the messages of more than a few users, the disk space needed by the Archiving database can grow very large. For this reason, we do not recommend collocating multiple databases, especially the Archiving database, Persistent Chat database, and Persistent Chat compliance database with the back-end database of an Enterprise pool.