• That makes more sense. I'm not familiar with terminal services licensing, but can you have 2 or 3 terminal servers under the same licensing? Is it by CAL or is it a CPU thing?

    If you are stuck with 50 instances per server, I still think going to generic instance names is best, with aliases. If I have instances named Cust01 and Cust02, I can connect to them like this (assume my Windows machine is TS01).

    TS01\Cust01

    TS02\Cust02

    However I can also set up an alias to TS01\Cust01 that might be Cust465, and both your staff and the customer can do this. A few references that might help:

    http://36chambers.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/how-to-set-up-aliases-for-named-instances-in-sql-server/

    http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic748728-146-1.aspx

    I think you are going to be limited to 50 instances no matter what. The rename doesn't work and the uninstall can be flaky, especially if you are looking to reinstall another instance again.