Quote Originally Posted by Laxity
Yes, I'd love to do it this way. Unfortunately this is to expensive for this project

Unfortunately I seem to have used the budget already.. so we will have to go with the risk of this one switch to fail. Fortunately the SLA we granted to our customer gives us some room for this kind of stuff.

As I see it the SPOF is the switch (as you mentioned). Besides that, does the setup seem okay to you?

Thank you in advance!
Laxity,

in terms of a tight budget and taking into account the schematic nature of the diagram, the setup looks basically ok. I'm missing the second link for each Xen server (you mentioned dual-port NICs) - you could use these for both redundancy and bandwidth.

Have you thought about using VLANs to separate the (VMs') Internet traffic from the Xen-Server-to-SAN traffic? Your DSS (and the Xen servers, too) are critical resources and not intended for open access - you could try to limit the Internet access to the actual VMs on the Xen servers (and mostly isolate those VMs from the "internal" network) to gain an inch of security.

And yes, your switch and the Internet connection both are SPOFs. Have you calculated your expected availability yet? I assume you might even get below 95%, depending on the quality of the switch - that's AEC-1. "High" availability unfortunately almost always violates tight budgets.

With regards,

Jens