dual-homed servers and clients

I have an interesting situation here - I have been tasked with providing a
solution where all clients and servers on a network are dual-homed. The
primary nic in each device will be connected to one physical network and the
secondary nics will all be connected to an almost identical, but physically
separate network. First let me say this was not of my design - the job was
put together and thrust upon me! Instead of building redundancy into the
network they insist on a totally separate network. Anyway, I am looking for
a way to "monitor" end to end communication between nic1 on the servers and
clients so they can automatically fall back to nic2 (on the backup network)
if end-to-end communication is lost. This way if communication is lost
anywhere on the primary network an outage is avoided, even if the local nic
is fine.

I'm just looking for advice here - any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

--
Matt Heffernan, MCSE:Security
Systems Administrator

I am glad it is you, not me!

The first problem that comes to mind is name resolution. How is a client
machine going to know which IP to use to contact a server? Are you going to
have duplicate DNS servers? How will a client know which one to use?

"matt_heff" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:955CF125-B97A-4C08-9A88-(E-Mail Removed)...
>I have an interesting situation here - I have been tasked with providing a
> solution where all clients and servers on a network are dual-homed. The
> primary nic in each device will be connected to one physical network and
> the
> secondary nics will all be connected to an almost identical, but
> physically
> separate network. First let me say this was not of my design - the job
> was
> put together and thrust upon me! Instead of building redundancy into the
> network they insist on a totally separate network. Anyway, I am looking
> for
> a way to "monitor" end to end communication between nic1 on the servers
> and
> clients so they can automatically fall back to nic2 (on the backup
> network)
> if end-to-end communication is lost. This way if communication is lost
> anywhere on the primary network an outage is avoided, even if the local
> nic
> is fine.
>
> I'm just looking for advice here - any help is appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Matt Heffernan, MCSE:Security
> Systems Administrator
>

Well that's where things get worse...because of the app that is being used,
both nics in the servers basically require the same ip...I believe my
solution for that though is using the teaming feature in the Intel pro server
adapters which allows multiple nics to share a configuration...but from what
I understand the only failover on teamed nics is in the case of a nic
failure. I need to be able to failover if communication is lost do to any
failure from end to end, such as a switch, switchport, etc... I have tried
to convince my superiors to use redundant uplinks ,hsrp, etc, you know, the
way things are meant to be... but they won't budge.....argh!!!

--
Matt Heffernan, MCSE:Security
Systems Administrator



"Bill Grant" wrote:

> I am glad it is you, not me!
>
> The first problem that comes to mind is name resolution. How is a client
> machine going to know which IP to use to contact a server? Are you going to
> have duplicate DNS servers? How will a client know which one to use?
>
> "matt_heff" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:955CF125-B97A-4C08-9A88-(E-Mail Removed)...
> >I have an interesting situation here - I have been tasked with providing a
> > solution where all clients and servers on a network are dual-homed. The
> > primary nic in each device will be connected to one physical network and
> > the
> > secondary nics will all be connected to an almost identical, but
> > physically
> > separate network. First let me say this was not of my design - the job
> > was
> > put together and thrust upon me! Instead of building redundancy into the
> > network they insist on a totally separate network. Anyway, I am looking
> > for
> > a way to "monitor" end to end communication between nic1 on the servers
> > and
> > clients so they can automatically fall back to nic2 (on the backup
> > network)
> > if end-to-end communication is lost. This way if communication is lost
> > anywhere on the primary network an outage is avoided, even if the local
> > nic
> > is fine.
> >
> > I'm just looking for advice here - any help is appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > --
> > Matt Heffernan, MCSE:Security
> > Systems Administrator
> >
>
>
>