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Server Setup - NIC Configuration question

I have a new server with 4 NICS. It is only connected to 1 subnet. Right now I only am using 1 NIC.

Is there any reason why I should use any of the other 3?


Thanks,
Bobby
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You still have redundancy, NIC ports can always go bad...I have seen it before with a single card with multiple ports.   Switch ports can go bad...so you still have fault tolerance.
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ob1_

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Ok makes sense. I just used the Broadcom Suite and Team Wizard to create a team for Load Balancing and failover.
We are not using VMWARE or VLANS so I disabled LiveLink (which i think assumes that different nics are connected to different switches).
Does this sound right to you all?
Also - if I connect the server through the team and connect all 4 nics to the local subnet do I need (4) 100 MB ports available on my network switch?
I currently have the server plugged into a 10MB port while I am setting it up and may be able to find (1) 100MB port but not 4 w/o buying a new switch.
Thanks,
Bobby
no the network bandwith will be the active nic bandwith not the sum of all the nics. teaming provides redundancy
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Ok I see - I can just manually move the cable to a different NIC if it goes down until I can buy a new switch...
you dont need to do that manually... define a team assisgn the network settings and connect the nics to the switch if you have different speed links then you may set the nic with higher speed as the default card too...
Another use for multiple NIC is for a Virtual Server Host.  VMWare ESXi and Microsoft's Hyper-V allow you to setup multiple virtual servers per a host.  You can then choose to either let all of the Virtual Servers share the same physical NIC port or you can assign each server to it's own NIC port.