The increasingly vital role of IT within a business motivates sharing of IT functions across the enterprise. In the shared IT model, IT acts as a service provider, hosting applications and managing servers, on behalf of different lines of business within the enterprise. The shared IT model helps organizations achieve new levels of cost efficiency, agility and service quality resulting in better alignment between business and IT. This HP VSE Reference Architecture represents a Shared Infrastructure for Databases suitable for organizations advancing from dedicated infrastructures to the shared IT model, it is based on a real customer implementation. With this solution, a centralized IT department can host and manage databases on behalf of different lines of businesses and gain several benefits.