Multiple NICs

[Hamish]

Hi,

We have a server in our office which has 4 gigabit NICs, this currently goes into a 10/100mb unmanaged ethernet switch. at the moment only 1 NIC is connected. Would it improve performance to plug more NICs into the switch? and if so would it be difficult to configure?

Also some of our other servers have multiple NICs too would it be useful to directly connect the servers with the most traffic between them with a crossover cable

cheers.

 

[Curiosityx]

Yes and no.

At present you wouldn't be able to plug all the NIC's into the switch mainly because it is unmanaged and as such would cause severe problems if you were to plug them all in.

What you can do and if your server support Network Teaming is put all the Network Cards into a single network team which effectively aggregates all the connections into one logical interface, then you can plug them into the switch, i still wouldn't recommend doing it on an unmanaged switch though, for a start you would need to force the port speeds on both the server and switch to 100Mbps/Full Duplex.

Even better if you can get a hold of a switch that's support LACP you can load balance the connections based on several parameters like source mac address, source/destination ip address.

Looking at the current scernario and should the server support teaming you would only be able to configure the team to use transmit load balancing with fault tolerance effectively allowing you to transmit from all the network cards as one logical unit but only receive traffic on one.


Example:

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/networking/teaming.html