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Teaming NICs

I am ordering a new DELL PE2850 and I want to be able to team the network cards. Can someone tell me what I would need to perform this setup. I have never teamed cards before so I am unfamiliar what it takes.

Thanks

Scott Anderson

If the PE2850 comes with dual NICs on board, there should be a utility that either comes with the NICs or is downloadable, that will handle the teaming (with some quick configuration). I believe Dell usually uses BroadCom or Intel NICs, which I've teamed up nicely in the past. Double-check the configuration that you are getting and do a quick verify with the NIC vendor or with Dell's download site, but these days, it shouldn't be an issue with being able to team them up.

Good Luck,
Scooter

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Scott Anderson

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mchristo63

ASKER

I thought I needed 3 cards, one acting as the main interface.

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gj99116

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Scott Anderson

Nope, all you need is two NIC's (although you can team with more if you like...)... The teaming software will create a "Virtual NIC" to represent the pool of NICs that you create for teaming. The Virtual NIC will load balance and do failover across all the NICs in the pool.

e.g. via Chessy ASCII Art:

NIC1 - IP1 \
NIC2 - IP2 |---- Virtual NIC with IP, Subnet, Gateway that is used in DNS/WINs, etc...
NICx - IPx /

Hope this helps,
Scooter

mchristo63

ASKER

Is there really a performance boost with teaming?

Scott Anderson

Well, yes and no. If the network interface is your bottleneck in throughput, then Load Balancing will help by giving an additonal 75-85% bandwith for adding a single card (subtracting overhead for LB).

If the slowness is elsewhere - it probably won't help much on a speed issue, but Failover will enhance uptime & reliability in case a NIC/Link ever fails.

Scooter

gj99116

If you believe (or have proof) that the network is the bottleneck than it can help. In most cases the main benefit would be the failover ability.

If the server is just being setup for the first time, trying it shouldn't hurt anything and you can always remove it if problems occur. If you search for NIC Teaming and NLB on any search engine you will find some people with problems... if that turns out to be you than you can turn it off relatively easily. Just make sure you test it with your applications/services before you put the server online. The virtual NIC that is often created will contain a different static IP address than the other NICS in the team... so if you decide to stop using teaming your clients/applications etc. that reference by IP will have to be changed or the static IP of the NIC you wish to use for the application will have to be set to whatever you had previously used for the virtual NIC.

gj99116

Thanks,

I hope all that helped!