The following scenario is built as an example which helps illustrate the concept of using a holistic design approach.

You have been engaged to design a virtualization solution for a financial organization. The solution you are proposing is to use 10 GB Converged Network Adapters (CNA) to provide connectivity to the organization's network in three 1U rack-mount servers. The organization needs to separate a Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) that is currently configured to be delivered over the CNA onto a physically separate network to satisfy a new compliance requirement. A 1 GB network will provide sufficient bandwidth for this network, and the network should be highly available. Single points of failure should be minimized.

To support this compliance requirement, you, the architect, must take a holistic approach to the design and answer a number of questions about each design decision, for example:

1. Are there network ports available in the current rack-mount servers, or will a network card need to be added? If a card has to be added, are there Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) slots available?
2. Will a dual-port network card provide sufficient redundancy, or will the network need to be separated across physical cards? Are there onboard network ports available that can be used with a PCI network card to provide in-box redundancy?
3. Has the hardware for the physically separate switch been obtained? If not, how long before the equipment is received and deployed? Will this have an impact on the implementation schedule?
4. How will the virtual switch need to be configured to provide the connectivity and redundancy that is required?