Bonding 2 network cards for better performance

[scottew]

All of our servers have 2 gigabit network cards and we have 3 Adtran Gigabit switches.

Is there a way to bond the 2 network cards together to obtain better performance?

Thanks in advance.

Scott

 

[Roadki11]

Yes, you can do this if the 2 cards are identical and they are server class nics and the manufacturer has teaming drivers for them. You can team the nics in several configurations, most commonly is load balancing where 2 1 gig nics give you 2gig of throughput or fault tolerance where 2 1gig nics give you 1 gig of throughput but if one fails or is unplugged the other picks up with out dropping the connection. most of my servers are setup in a fault tolerance configuration but i do have a few load balancing.

RoadKi11

 

[scottew]

Thanks Roadkill, I'm gonna give it a shot and see what happens.