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2 Network Cards on NT 2000 Server

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7 replies

by alig

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I'm wondering, is there any advantage to using 2 or 3 network cards on a heavily used 2000 Server to prevent data bottlenecks? If so how can I set it up in 2000? Any other usefull way to use the multiple network cards?
Thanks

7 replies

by jkohut

The answer depends upon your definition of "Heavily Used". Is your server busy doing Network Communications or CPU/Disk I/O?
You should be able to Install, Protocol, Network Monitor Driver, and then use Performance Console to look at your Network Segment Utilization during "busy" times of the day. If your network peformance (I assume 100MB ethernet) goes beyond about 50% for extended periods of time, then I would suggest another Network Card. Also look and see what your Disk I/O and CPU are doing(using Performance console). Often the slowness is in the Disk I/O and extra memory will benefit more than second Network Card. Sorry, just about out of space. Hope this helped.

by alig

The question is in general. I will have servers that will probably need two network cards such as exchange 2000 or even a 2000 DC. I was wondering how I could utilize two network cards on a server. I know I need to assign an IP address for each card, but do I need to tell 2000 how to use each card?

by pc handyman

I am currently using multiple NICs in servers where I work, some of the servers are NT 4 others are W2K. By segmenting out the network we can use one NIC for public access another for backups, another for direct server to server communications. Byusing VLANs and only having the public interface with a gateway we force the traffic to the appropreate network.

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