Hi Adamu,
If you are adding a NIC to a team to give yourself more bandwidth, it is
important to know which direction you are expecting to improve. I am going
to put on my networking hat here, so bear with me.
If you need more bandwidth from the server to the client:
Binding the NICs together will give you additional bandwidth as the sessions
to the client are initiated by the individual NICs. Remember that this is
not a true load balance, but a load sharing that will approximate balance
through a roughly equal division of sessions. The sessions will be bound to
the originating NIC for the lifetime of the session (rather short.)
If you need more bandwidth from the client to the server:
You'll note that you have a single IP address and two MAC addresses. The
problem arises when packets come out of their Layer-3 wrappers and do an ARP
lookup on the local segment for the NIC they need to target. The server
can't just round-robin the NICs for the IP address as the switch caches the
lookup in the ARP table and the switching or multiple routes would kick
spanning tree into action.
There are two solutions here -- and the one chosen will depend on the
manufacturer and the version of the drivers. The NICs will either only allow
one to accept connections and fail in the event that the other goes down, OR
the NICs will announce a spoofed MAC address and use software in the drivers
to manage the connections. Most manufacturers use the former solution.
If you are trying to improve inbound connections, you will want to talk with
your hardware provider and be careful in your questioning -- oftentimes
someone you get on the phone won't know how this really works under the hood.
Hope this helps.
--
Ryan Hanisco
MCSE, MCTS: SQL 2005, Project+
http://www.techsterity.com
Chicago, IL
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"Adamu Garba" wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Please can anybody help on how we can configure NIC teaming on our
> Application server to enhance data troughput? We host a third party
> accounting application on the application server and accessibility is
> becomming slower with current increase in number of access by users of
> accounting department. we monitor the NIC interface with both performace
> monitor interface objects, Task manager networking tab and MS Network
> moninor tool, the result shows that the interface throughput is near
> capacity( 85%-96%)
>
> any help or contibution will help
> Thanks in advance
> Adamu Garba.
>
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