Setting up load balancing on server 2003

[Kyle]

Can some one tell how to set this up and also the benifits of it. I have a 2003 server witth 2 x 1gb NIC.s. One of the nics is not in use the other has a static IP.

SOmeone asked me to look into this and i dont really know much about it.

[Ric_]

Depending upon the NICs, you will have a software suite which allows you to 'team' the adapters (terminology may differ).

You also need to 'team'/'trunk' the ports on the switch (again terminology may vary... you will also need a managed switch).

I take it that your other post about monitoring the network is to see whether you need to do this... you may find out that something else is throttling things (disk reads possibly).

Another option might be to spread fileserver roles across servers or use DFS.

[Kyle]

The school i am thinking of doing this in has a newish Dell Server. I have readmore about it now and noticed similar posts on the forum. I think i need to team the cards and also configure the ports on the switch, but to be honest its a bit over my head at the moment.

[mjs_mjs]

Depending upon the NICs, you will have a software suite which allows you to 'team' the adapters (terminology may differ).

You also need to 'team'/'trunk' the ports on the switch (again terminology may vary... you will also need a managed switch).

I take it that your other post about monitoring the network is to see whether you need to do this... you may find out that something else is throttling things (disk reads possibly).

Another option might be to spread fileserver roles across servers or use DFS.

other terms include 'bonding' and 'link aggregation'

I can throttle a 100Mb link on windows server 2003 by moving files to a RAID 1 array but a Gb??? what are you doing to be hitting 100% on that nic?

[Michael]

I'd say Intel's cards/software is the best for teaming up network cards. You'd also need a manageable switch to configure ports accordingly otherwise it will bring your network to a crawl if you just plugged two cables in!

I can't say I have maxed out a Gigabit link yet, although in theory with a Quad Intel card and an appropriate switch you could create a 4Gbps link at a fraction of the cost of 10Gbps.

[zag]

I don't think our gbit network socket has ever gone about 20% usage. The Raid 5 disk just cant keep up when multiple users are requesting data from the server.