🚀 go-pugleaf

I couldn't read the article in French but I could pick out enough to figure
essentially what it was talking about which is sort of fun<g>.

It absolutely IS possible to install two or more NICs in a NT Server.  What
you have to do, as mentioned in this article, is give them each their own IP
address and physically or logically segment the network to get incoming
client stations divided between the NICs and IP addresses.  Any single
session like a large outgoing or incoming file transfer (like a tape backup
for example) will only use ONE of those NICs to get to it's destination.
With the RAID/Disk analogy, this is like taking 5 disks in JBOD mode and
saying, users 1-5 write to disk1, 6-10 to disk 2, you have delayed the
problem but not fixed it.  If disk1 fills, those users can not use the
excess space on disk2,etc.

This can improve the situation but you still may have situations where one
NIC is a bottleneck while the other sits idle.  You now have two or more
potential bottlenecks.  This is essentially manual load balancing.
Depending on the configuration, you may or may not get the benefit of fault
tolerance.  If a NIC fails, users looking for that IP address may be out of
luck.

Balance groups the NICs into a single logical adapter with a single IP
address.  No special hardware or name resolution "tricks" required.   Take 4
100Mb NICs and you essentially have what acts like a single 400Mb NIC
connection to the network.  Clients connecting to the server are distributed
round-robin among the balanced NICs to maintain even distribution (as they
ARP, the ARP response is alternated among nics).  Out going traffic is
essentially "striped" across the balanced NICs.  If one user starts a large
file transfer monopolizing one NIC, others are automatically "migrated" to
less active ports.  If a NIC, cable or switch port fails, users
transparently migrate to another.

Even if you chose to segment the network, you can use Balance to create a
virtual adapter for each segment, for example, NIC1 and 2=VirtualAdapter1
for Segment1 and NIC3 and NIC4=Virtual Adapter2 for Segment2.  If these are
100Mb NICs, you essentially would have 2 200MB segments where NIC4 can
failover for NIC3 or vice versa, etc.

As with anything...there are multiple ways of doing things with different
pro's and cons.  BTW...Balance Suite is available in France through Sunbelt
Software.  I don't know if they have a site specificlly for France but you
can find more information at http://www.sunbelt-software.com

Good luck.

Fabien Lebargy wrote in message <79p4lh$jkq$1@minus.oleane.net>...
>It seems possible to install multiple NICs card in a NT server, just have a
>look at this article :
>    http://www.windowsntmag.presse.fr/dos004.htm
>It's in french so it will not be a problem for you...
>
>Let me know if it works as well as it looks like, you can mail me by mail
in
>french...  ;-)
>
>Best regards,
>
>Fabien LEBARGY.
>
>
>Bertrand GILLET <3-id@dxcommunication.fr> a �crit dans le message
><79mua6$h7c$1@minus.oleane.net>...
>>Hi,
>>
>>I have a 100base-t network
>>On my server I have NT4SP4 and one 905btx from 3com.
>>I wourld like to increase the bandwidth thru my server.
>>I wonder if it's possible to install a second NIC card to increase
>>performance.
>>
>>If it's possible, how to configure it ?
>>I use tcp/ip, so must I assign the same IP adress to both cards ?
>>Or not ?
>>
>>Please help me!!
>>
>>Best regards from France
>>
>>Bertrand GILLET
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>