Listening to Scott Hanselman\'s interview with the Stack Overflow team (part 1 and 2), he was adamant that the SQL server and application server should be on separate machin
Database licences are not cheep and are often charged per CPU, therefore by separating out your web-servers you can reduce the cost of your database licences.
E.g if you have 1 server doing both web and database that contains 8 CPUs you will have to pay for an 8 cpu licence. However if you have two servers each with 4 CPUs and runs the database on one server you will only have to pay for a 4 cpu licences