JS wanted to create two wp sites, each with a virtual domain name (maker.uvic.ca and dance.uvic.ca). Based on recent events with etcl and dhsi, I knew to create two separate instances of front end, and to make things simpler, the backend too (though I could have got away with only one backend by taking some care in the table-name prefixes for each instance).

Provisioned space on our server for this, but then discovered that other people in the dance project wanted the frontend on the unix.uvic.ca server (not sure why exactly), so that meant the back-end sql database had to be theirs and not ours, so got that set up.
For the maker instance, set up a db on our sql db server and I think everything is now sorted out.