Thanks for the advice. I think given the circumstances I will push towards an isolated SharePoint instance considering the amount of other applications that we support.

Regarding the optimization of MAXDOP and memory configuration, what perfmon counters would you use for analysis?

For memory, I'm sure setting the min and max memory around the average of Total Server Memory when tracing for a week, assuming that there is still plenty of overhead for the OS in the event that both instances reach max memory.

MAXDOP seems a bit more complicated, though. I would imagine I would have to baseline various performance counters on a per core basis. Do you have any advice as far as this goes?

We want to be as precise and thought out as possible with our configurations and would prefer to base it around empirical evidence. If the analysis is too much, we would then refer to Microsoft's general guidelines.

Nice bass btw..is that an American P-bass?