Discussion on:

Use dual NICs to maximize network throughput

I'd say you should also check the setup or config of the hubs and switches you are connecting the dual nic's too, some may have difficulty handling traffic to the same IP address's on two different ports or switches.

Hubs and switches don't care about IP addresses - they work with MAC addresses, so they shouldn't be affected. See the OSI network model...

My switches, Alcatel OmniSwitch/Routers, would care in this situation, as they indeed know about IP addresses. My switch would detect a duplicate IP address if a servers 2 NIC's had the same IP address. It would show one IP address assigned to twoMAC address's. My guess is other switches would care as well.

Remember though, your Alcatel "cares" because it is a "Layer-3 switch" and understands the network layer of the OSI.

Most of the basic switches and ALL hubs will not care about IP addresses coming in. The switch may have issues with MAC addresses, but certainly not the hub.

Great points everyone. But remember if you select multicast in your configuration you have two very important things to look out for. The first is if you are connecting to a switch instead of a hub (who would connecting to a hub anyway) you need to make a registry hack. The second is that all your infrastructure must support multicast addresses. The way NLB works is that it changes the MAC address of the Nic's to distribute the response to the traffic and ALL of the incoming requests go to ALL Nic's.

At a former client, I went this route. Much to my dismay, The Alcatel Omni switch did care about the IP address. Went so far as having the Alcatel service rep come by. End result was we could never get it to work correctly. All though it worked, the switch generate errors to the monitoring software and daily I would see disconnects on the port, I would see errors in the NT log that would show a disconnect every 30 seconds that occured once an hour for about 15 min. NIC's would keep swapping from primary to backup and back. End result, Network people told me to disconnect the second NIC

My advice, check to make sure your switch will handel dual NIC prior to implenting. I beleive INTEL will handel up to 8 NIC. I was using the software that came with HP's, that would handel up 6 NIC. Both can be used in Fault Tolance and/or Load balancing modes.

switches do - ever heard of Layer 3 & 4 switches?

When i added new NIC to W2K i have received the following Event :
A duplicate name has been detected on the TCP network. The IP address of the machine that sent the message is in the data. Use nbtstat -n in a command window to see which name is inthe Conflict state.

2 NIC IP addresses added to DNS.
How to use 2 Nic without any problems !

Another alternative is to do a very simple round robin system using DNS. Set up each NIC with a different IP address, and set up two DNS entries on your server, with the same hostname but pointing to the two separate IPs. A DNS server by default should then give out the first IP to the first request, and the second IP to the second request, and so on. It's more primitive, but it doesn't require any extra software at all!

Look up 'Round Robin' on the Windows 2000 Server DNS help for more information.

Anyone have any experiences they would like to share on installing a 2nd NIC on a standard Win2K server?

Most of the time, I have used the vendor supplied Teaming utility for Load-balancing and failover on a single server with multiple nics. Dell, HP/Compaq, and IBM typically provide the teaming driver (usually an OEM of an Intel driver) that works just fine.

This can be used in a configuration with multiple trunked switches for a failover setup, or with a single switch for port aggregation (giving you higher throughput).

I have a Dell Poweredge 2400 for which we purchased the optional Dual Port Intel Pro Server adapter. Like Rdendtler has suggested I have set up the Intel Proset adapter teaming service to team the 2 dual ports and the 1 onboard NIC adapter. Then Iset the Cisco switch, to which the server is attached, to 100Mb Full Duplex communications (100Mb for the server, 10Mb for staff) for a nice big fat pipe for my network traffic.

One other thing, the Inter Dual port adapter requires a 64 bit PCI slot which might cause some difficulties putting into some servers. I checked out the NIC listed in the article from Adaptec and it looks like their cards might fit into standard 32bit PCI adapters.

For Intel server NICs, you can also team up several NICs together as one. You can choose Fault tolerance, Load Sharing, FEC or 802.1q to setup the teaming NICs. The teaming software works like a new NIC card driver.

The company I work for buys Dell servers with the Intel integrated NIC. We buy a dual port Intel NIC with them for $160 and the software to run them in teaming mode or Load Balancing mode comes on Dell's CD. Triple network connectivity and load-balancing for a great price.

I have a PowerEdge 1650 with Intel Dual Port where in the CD can I find the software to do load balancing. Or how can I do that.

Here's a question..
If you place 2 NIC's in the same machine without loadbalance software and give each NIC a seperate IP address would they both use the same NETBIOS name?
And would it make a difference on the server as far as throughput?

Any advice on changing an existing Windows 2000 Std DC from a 3Com one NIC to an Intel DUAL NIC? It is the only Server in a small business when I first attempted DHCP stopped working and I didn't allow enought time to see if it just needed time to work it out. I switched back to the 3Com everything started working correctly again.

that an "independant" source like TechRepublic fails to recognize, let alone mention, other network operating systems like Linux and Novell NetWare.
Then again: the Microsoft advertisement accompanying this article says it all...

I'm looking for the same thing for Ubuntu 9.04 linux.