NIC Teaming question

[waltjones401]

I am installing Small Business Server 2003 on a Dell Poweredge 2850 and courious if the NIC Teaming feature is beneficial. We have one BroadCom PCI connected to our ISP's router for internet access and Gb2 set for our LAN. I understand that NIC Teaming allows redundancy in case of failure, but I'm not sure how to implement it.

 

[ILW]

Teaming won't help with your current config, as your 2 NICs are connected to different places.
Where it would help is if you had 2 NICs which you could connect both to your LAN. There are 2 main ways to benefit from this.
1) Connect both NICs to the same network switch & team into 1 "pipe" to give the server twice the bandwidth to the network. This would also have the benefit that if 1 NIC failed, the server would remain available with just less bandwidth.
2) Connect each of the NICs to separate network switches on the same VLAN (make sure you've got Spanningtree enabled) & team as fail-on-fault. This means you don't get increased bandwidth to the server, but do increase resilience - whether a NIC or a network switch fail, the server stays available.

btw - these principles are not only applicable to Dell hardware.

Happy teaming ;-)