Good article Steve. We've been doing some consioldation on to active/passive clusters. One cluster presently has 20+ applications on it. Yes, there are notification and maintenance headaches associated with this consolidation architecture just as detailed in the article. So now we are exploring a slightly different take. Using almost the same consolodation, but with multiple instances on the cluster - thusd enabling us to separate the applications again. This should afford us the maintenance flexibilty we had when we had many database servers. It also addresses the issue of those rogue applciations that needed 'sa' or 'sysadmin' role - which under the single instance cluster, prevented us from further server consoldation unless we wanted to put others at risk. So far out research only seems to be impacted by the SQL2K limit of 16 named instances per cluster.