NIC bonding with WIN2K

[rap1971]

I googled this subject and thought there was a thread here, but it came up empty, not sure what that means. I have been asked to investigate NIC bonding for our Win2K servers. Everything I find is for Linux/Solaris. Does anyone have any info, pointers? Thanks.

 

[bcastner]

"bonding" usually means combining the two streams to double the capacity and provide failover. For this you need to have the featureset in a hardware router.

"Teaming" can be done natively in Win2k Advanced Servers. There are some third-party solutions as well from 3-Com, Intel and others. See:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Networking/Q_20368223.html

 

[bcastner]

If it helps you in searching, Microsoft calls "teaming" by the term "load balancing." Third-parties usually call it "teaming."

 

[AvayaNovice]

bcastner, I'm not too familiar with the teaming function of win2k, if you have a second, give me a basic rundown on what it is.

 

[bcastner]

The key is load balancing, the distribution of a server's TCP/IP connection load by distributing it among several adapters, or several servers in a cluster.

"Teaming" in Third Party configuration usually means the use of two or more adapters in a server to handle load balancing. You can choose to balance the overall load, or load by port, or load by IP address. In distributing the overall load of connections among adapters you can generally increase the effective server response to its load level by 20%. More commonly it is done be either port or IP. If a server had IIs responsibilities, for example, it might make sense for a busy web site to focus a single adapter to this traffic; and a second adapter for all other ports. IP seperation would let an adapter focus on say half your LAN IPs, and a second adapter another half of your LAN IPs.

In the Advanced Server where multiple servers are possible, load balancing is extended along the above lines to include dividing the workload of a server cluster either for the total load, or again by port or IP range.

The intention in all cases is to increase server throughput and provide automatic failover.

 

[AvayaNovice]

OK... I thought teaming was different than load balancing, or unrelated.

Load balancing is commonly achieved through either multiple adapters in one box, or in the cases that I'm more familiar with -- using multiple boxes that are capable of serving the same content. An example would be a content loading model using five webservers with a database backend, where the webservers use two adapters -- one adapter serving side, one adapter loading from the database, thereby achieving two seperate networks. Then... balancing the load of requests amongst those five webservers.

I've usually done this using software in UNIX with a "master" box.

 

[bytehd]

so this will work under Advanced server?
and double our bandwidth is using two fifferent ISPs?

http://www.insyncva.com

 

[trappinout]

Hi,
I have two web servers each with one nic. The servers virtual ip address can be pinged within the subnet. Each server can ping other subnets. Other subnets can ping each web servers dedicated ip address. The problem is other subnets cannot ping the cluster virtual ip address. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.