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NT 4.0 server and 2 NICs

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by woody h 1 view

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Could someone please tell me if it is possible to enable NT server to use 2 network cards to distribute the network traffic? Also, if it is possible, how? Thanks.

Woody

11 replies

by fgarber

Yes. you can use two or more nic cards in an NT server to distribute network traffic but I don't recommend it. NT is a very inefficient router. If you need to route traffic an inexpensive router with multiple ports is much better than trying to use a multi-homed nt server. However if you insist on doing this I will be glad to send you docs on how to set it up but don't be too disappointed in the throughput you get.

by duwaned

Hi Woody.

As far as I know there is no generic support that comes with NT to be able to do this on.

Compaq has a series of network cards that can be teamed (for load sharing), or set up for redundancy depending on your needs.

If you team the cards, you could load balance accross them both. There are several Compaq cards that you can do this with, but the only one I can think of at the moment is a NC3123 Compaq cards. Contact a Compaq re-seller in your area to get them for you.

I am pretty sure that you could load these cards into any make of server and team them, but have not tried this on servers other than Compaqs. The re-seller will be able to tell you if you can do this.

Regards.
Duwane.

by duwaned

In the above answer, I was also assuming that you were wanting to use both cards with the same IP address. It is possible to use 2 nics in the same machine, but not with the same IP address.

by duwaned

Frank, I think that you are mis-understanding the question. Woody is wanting to load ballance traffic on a server using more than one NIC to distribute the load. The reason I suggested Compaq cards is because I know for a fact that you can team as many of them as you want together, and use the same IP address. This effectivly distributes the network load between all the cards without having to set up the clients to look at new IP addresses.

by fgarber

At one time in our invironment we had a server with 3 nic cards routing traffic to different network segments. It doesn't matter what vendors cards you use. The cards do have to have different ip addresses and they MUST be set up with only one gateway address. Like I said before if you really want to do this I will help but reluctantly.

by joshg

Get a couple 3Com Fast Etherlink Server NIC's 3C980B-TX, they come with load balancing software that allows you to prioritize services and IP traffic for each nic. I think it uses the same IP and they work well with NT. I have a dozen or so that are in my servers now but I chose not to use the load balancing software.

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