Well - we have not reached a final conclusion yet - but….
We realized that using virtual firewalls, how ever flexible, it still would be a single point of failure, and thus effectively making CARP on main firewall pointless.
Yes we would have HW failure protection, but there would still be ONE VM that could fail, and thus essentially creation a "System Down" event.
So - currently we are leaning towards option 2 - in regards to the DMZ.
On the matter of using Snort or Proxy ... - welll - we are still in the dark and looking into options.
Not sure that helped much... ::)
/Jannik