Heya Ty,

First, let me add another voice to lament the situation you find yourself in. I'm also a major proponent of a separate ETL server, although the size of your organization really doesn't warrant it... because the reasons it's important aren't important to you... yet.

First and foremost, a dedicated ETL server allows for more effecient security and organization. It means that individual servers have their SQL agent/schedules/etc dedicated to simple maintenance to their hosted items. Index rebuilds, backups, etc. All ETL work and the like are also in a single place, so there's no hide and seek for packages that pull instead of push when you do ETL changes, etc.

Next, you don't end up in memory wars with your existing applications when you're running large processed in mid-day against your critical systems.

Thirdly, as mentioned, reboots and installs and the like on a separate ETL server allow for rebooting the SSIS components without requiring a critical system to be taken down because someone wants a new DDL library for some random off the wall process they're building.

None of these apply to your environment. You're wasting a perfectly good and purchased license to... do practically nothing with it. You could have a dev environment on that weaker box! You could... well, a lot of things.

I would seriously consider moving the SSIS/ETL components over to the warehouse server for now, until your organization actually grows large enough to be important. Use the old ETL server as a dev box, and get your developers used to playing in the sandbox without breaking production.

That's... a mess. You need to decide if the politics are ripe to start fixing things, or if you want to duck and just collect your paycheck. Either way, I'd write up the email explaining the logic behind the changes and pass it along to those who matter, so at least you have said paperwork to cover your arse when someone tries to bring the hammer down on your head.