I'm looking for some best practices here... Our ERP system is Dynamics AX 2009, but we're upgrading to AX 2012. Everything is virtual except the SQL Server. Everything hits the SQL Server; ERP, Website, and all reporting. The website and some reporting need to be 'to the minute'. Should I go with a transactional replication or something along the lines of that and have a database server that take some load off the SQL Server?
Yes, Transactional Replication is typically used to off-load reporting to another server/instance and can provide low latency. The same can be done with Snapshot Replication if you only need an point-in-time or end of day reporting. The benefit of using Transactional or Snapshot Replication is you can place different indexes on the subscriber(s) to optimize reporting. You can also choose to replicate only a portion of the data if only a subset is needed for reporting.
Have a look at Transactional Replication to get started.
If you have any questions, let me know. I hope this helps.