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I am in the process of moving server room into the datacenter and it is a good time to review current setup for security zones.We are using Vsphere 4 Standard and Cisco ASA 5510 firewall. At the moment firewall is a single connection point for all DMZ, LAN , WAN and Backend zones, so all traffic between all zones traverses this 100 Mb/s firewall device.

This worked for a while however new services we deploy will require fast connection between some zones,i.e. database queries and file transfers, so 100Mb/s will become a bottleneck.

One of the possible solution offered for DMZ:
- use separate VNICs for each DMZ host, one for external connection used by customers accessing it from WAN, one for connecting to Backend/LAN zones. - As a result,VNIC1 is connected to firewall for filtering external untrusted connections.VNIC2 however, bypases firewall and all filtering is done on iptables level or Windows 2008 firewall.This solves the problem of bandwidth limitations between DMZ and Backend imposed by firewall.

This design however removes centralized security model we used to have with one appliance and creates management headache with scattered iptables setups tied up to the servers. There should be a better way to do it.What would you suggest? I hav a feeling that features in Vsphere Enterprise Plus may help here , e.g. distributed switch and vShield zones. We are planning to get it next year but even if it helps we still need to have some solution.
I would appreciate any advice or reading material,

Thanks a lot

Sergei

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It seems that design I described is the way to go.One solution would be to getting a firewall with the higher througput but my research show it is not really worth it.
I will add iptables to puppet setup and do something similar with Windows firewall.

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