Question : Problem: Single Server, Multiple NICs

My network consists of a single server (Server 2003) with 2 NICs.

The client machines are all XP. The server is responsible for AD, DHCP, and DNS.

I was wondering what's the best way to configure these cards? Is there any benefit to having both NICs 'live'?

Thanks.

Answer : Problem: Single Server, Multiple NICs

Yep, you can 'team' the NIC's. Effectively both nics will use that same IP address. For example, configure them for 192.168.0.2 (or your current server's IP) then both nics will answer requests to 192.168.0.2. They will also respond as being 192.168.0.2. Now, your server has twice the bandwidth to your switch, if you have 10/100 NIC's, teamed NIC's will give you 200 MB/s. With that said, you probably won't notice much of a speed increase unless your 1 NIC currently experiences a lot of bandwidth and spikes high frequently. ie, if your baselining at 4 mb/s constant traffic, going from 100 mb/s to 200 mb/s won't help any really. However, in the event one of the 'teamed' NIC's fails, the other one just continues and does all the work. It's quite common for servers to have dual or 'teamed' nics to help with redundancy and any bandwidth spikes.

I've always used the network utility that comes with my servers to configure my NIC's. What model server do you have? you might have one of these utilities on your server. Otherwise you can look into load balancing.

Hope this helps