Re: Bonding Network cards in SBS 2003

[Andrew Hodgson]

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 07:55:15 -0800, DominicI
<Domi...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>I have just installed 3 extra network cards in my server. I've been told that
>i can bond my current one and the 3 new ones so that i get a single IP
>address.
>Could someone explain to me how this is done

You need software that is capable of doing this. Your manufacturer
should be able to provide such software, i.e, Intel ProSet or Broadcom
BASP.

Andrew.

[Cris Hanna [SBS-MVP]]

what in the world would you need 3 extra nics for a max of 75
users/workstations

--
Cris Hanna [SBS-MVP]
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"Andrew Hodgson" <m...@privacy.net> wrote in message
news:ek89t2hfvmqc97qs3...@news.giganews.com...

[Gregg Hill]

If he had four 100Mbps NICs, he could team them to get higher speed of
400Mbps...or he could pop in one Gigabit card and a cheap Gigabit switch,
probably for close to the same price.

Gregg Hill

"Cris Hanna [SBS-MVP]" <crisnos...@computingnospampossibilities.net>
wrote in message news:62F8859B-9452-4E05...@microsoft.com...

[Cris Hanna [SBS-MVP]]

In my world there's a big difference between can you and should you
UNLESS a company is doing huge SQL stuff or CAD stuff, Fast Ethernet (100mb
full duplex) should be ample.

--
Cris Hanna [SBS-MVP]
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"Gregg Hill" <bo...@nowhere.com> wrote in message
news:eZK6o%23TUH...@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...

[Luke Sheldrick]

Could be two different net connections coming in, and one going out to the
LAN...

"Cris Hanna [SBS-MVP]" <crisnos...@computingnospampossibilities.net>
wrote in message news:62F8859B-9452-4E05...@microsoft.com...

[Leythos]

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 12:27:04 -0800, Gregg Hill wrote:
>
> If he had four 100Mbps NICs, he could team them to get higher speed of
> 400Mbps...or he could pop in one Gigabit card and a cheap Gigabit switch,
> probably for close to the same price.

Actually, with 4 100mbps NIC's he's still only getting 100mbps, but he's
getting 4 conversations at 100mbps instead of 1 at 100mbps. While you
might think it's 400mbps, it's only 100 for any single conversation.

--
Leythos
spam9...@rrohio.com (remove 999 for proper email address)

[Gregg Hill]

Not from my understanding of teamed NICs. It increases the speed. All teamed
NICs act as one.

A waste of money in my opinion, compared to going to Gigabit.

Gregg Hill

"Leythos" <Vo...@nowhere.com> wrote in message
news:1171594...@sp6iad.superfeed.net...

[Cris Hanna [SBS-MVP]]

Gigabit cards are cheap...and you will get higher throughput and much less
hassle with SBS rather than 4 cards "teamed"

--
Cris Hanna [SBS-MVP]
------------------------------
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MVPs do not work for Microsoft
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"DominicI" <Domi...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:34FCD49F-2D4A-4A27...@microsoft.com...
> Hi guys, thanks for the advice. The cards are all Intel Pro 1000's ,the
> server has a SCSI320 dual chanel Raid 5 Hybrid array linked to it and some
> of
> the time it will need to transfear large files (video HiDef) anything from
> a
> few MB's to a TB. As they say Speed is king

[DominicI]

I am using Gigabit cards!! 1 on the MoBo and the other 3 as 64Bit PCI cards,
however i still need to bond ot team them!!

[Jim Behning SBS MVP]

I have an account using Autocad and they are able to function just
fine on 100Mb network. I backup 6 gigs from another server at night
using a gig network and my speed is fine. What are you doing?

[Stew]

100mb? Man, you're living in the 20th century, lol Myself, I believe there
is NEVER any reason other than lack of resources to turn down speed!

Although 1GB cards were agequate until recently, with the advent of
PCI-Express, one 1GB network card is nowhere near being able to keep up with
the bandwidth available from the motherboard memory and disk sub-systems.
Teaming 1GB cards can cut response times down considerable when used with the
right equipment (motherboard/nics/memory/disks, etc). Intel has white papers
on this that prove this point without doubt. Their research is not chatter
on a message board:

http://cache-www.intel.com/cd/00/00/11/46/114681_maximising_gigabit.pdf

http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-009747.htm#Considerations

Incidentally, I know a lot of people think that teaming doesn't work with
SBS - that's an old wives tale. It works just fine. You just can't run the
wizards without the nics being teamed. And it you do make a mistake and need
to correct something, and for some reason the wizards aren't running with the
team in place because of the particular problem you are experiencing, all you
do is disable the team, disable the secondary nic, run the wizard, then
re-enable the seconday nic and re-team the nics. Takes about 2 minutes.

In fact, the whole argument about not being able to run wizards in a teamed
SBS environment is 1) false, and 2) if you do have to disable the team to fix
something the effort required reminds me of the Geikko Gekko saying: "That's
like what, standing up?"

PS - I have 3 servers, one a SBS Premium w/ISA 2004. The others are Std
2003. All of them are Intel SE7520, 4GB ram, Dual Xeons, SATAII drives, and
all have 2 1GB NICs except the SBS box which has 3. I never have trouble
running CEICW or any other wizard, and can run them anytime I want. And I
notice considerable performance advantages. Yes I do run some CAD, I have
other 6 people running SQL2005 applications, all are hitting the internet for
reasearch and todownload materials, and 3 or so are always running Quickbooks
Pro and trying to drag a 200GB Quickbooks file thru searches all day long.
Just working with the Quickbooks files alone made the move to teamed
connections worthwhile.

But the caveat: I don't know if I would have tried this if I wasn't running
all Intel stuff. Intel may be the only source that has all the teaming
problems worked out. I see posts from people with HP and other machines that
have problems with teaming, even without the complexity of SBS.

[Stew]

sorry, typo: that quickbooks file is mb, not gb !

[DominicI]

Try backing up 250GB+ over night? or shifting several TB's of files from a Hi
Def (HD) video editing computer to a server.

I know it is possible, what i dont know is if it can be done within SBS or
if it needs other software.
Does any one know how to do it

[DanDanDan]

Why not try NAS (Network Attached Storage) or SAN (Storage Attached
Networks) ?

Regards

Dan

"DominicI" <Domi...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message

news:521630C6-6153-4CAD...@microsoft.com...

>I have just installed 3 extra network cards in my server. I've been told
>that
> i can bond my current one and the 3 new ones so that i get a single IP
> address.
> Could someone explain to me how this is done
>

> Regards
>
> Dominic

[Stew]

Why on earth would you have to explain your self in your desire for speed?
You already have the right equipment, it's a downright crime to use it
inefficiently!!!

I'll be happy to show you how it's done:

I don't know your system, but lets assume you are in what we call a "2-NIC"
topology, where one NIC is facing the internet as your internet controller
and the other is facing the LAN as your LAN controller. You have two other
cards you want to utilize, great - let's get started!

You start with a configuration where two NIC's are enabled, so "disable" the
extra 2. I suggest you plan on using the MB NIC as the internet controller,
as it's best to team up all identical cards. With the 2 controllers enabled
run CEICW and make sure everything works correctly.

Then "enable" and bring online JUST ONE of your other two cards. When it
comes on it should respond with "acquiring network address" (you should have
these cards initialized as blank config, using all automatic settings thru
DNS and DHCP - if they ever had any manual settings, turn those off before
proceeding)

Once this card is online, all your attention is now directed ONLY to the
original LAN controller - this will ALWAYS be your "Primary" controller for
the team. Right-click on it in network Connections and select "Properties".
Look for the button that Intel has placed on this screen named "Configure"
and click for it. it's just to the right of the adapter name. Configure
will take a few seconds to come up, then click on the "Teaming" tab. Select
the radio button "Team with other adapters", then "New Team". Give the Team
a name, I usually use "Servername LAN Team", then make sure both adapters
have checkmarks in boxes as being selected.

In the next screen you will have to select the "teaming mode". Let's keep
things simple here for now - the one you want is "Adaptive Load Balancing".
You want this one because it works with any switch, (not just managed
switches with agreggation capabilities) and also because it provides for both
send and receive (one adapter set up as receive, and the transmit activity
spread over the others). This mode also gets you fault tolerance, which is
good. Later on you may want to try a more robust mode, but for now pick this
one., click and go forward.

The wizard creates the new LAN team after a few seconds. It may or may not
tell you it will have to reboot. If it does, DON'T REBOOT!! This part is
where you can get into trouble. In network connections, you will see an new
network connection not there before, and it will say "Local Area Connection"
and the device name will be "Team: Servername LAN TEAM" (or whatever you
named it). Right click on it and select properties. Now you will see why
you couldn't reboot. This connection will not have manual settings. If you
had rebooted when it said to do so, the SBS would not have booted up
correctly and the CEICW would not have worked. Go ahead now and set the
manual settings exaclty like you have them before for you LAN connection (IP,
DNS, WINS, etc). You may also at this point want to rename the connection
(your choice).

Reboot!! When you get to the desktop, check out the connections. If you
made the checkboxes under the properties for each adapter, you could actually
see 4 icons at this point (1 for internet, 1 for each LAN adapter, 1 for the
Team connection).

If you feel assured everything went as planned, the connections are active,
etc, go to properties and look at each. The Team connection is now the only
one of the LAN connections that shows TCP/IP selected like a regular adapter.
The others just show "Intel Advanced network Services Protocol" and "Qos
Packet Scheduler" as selected.

Now go ahead and run CEICW again. It should work just fine. run it for
awhile to test things out before adding the 3rd NIC. The process for doing
that is almost identical, you can add NICs to the team at any time. Just
remember to NOT REBOOT during the process before manually configuring the
Team Connection settings under properties.

In the event that you make a serious mistake and things get hung up, during
the boot process, tap the F8 key, then get to where you can select "The last
known settings that worked", which will take you back to the 2 NIC
configuration, and you can start over.

Good luck!!

[DominicI]

Stew

Havent had a chance to read your reply all the way though (it's friday
evening (i'm in the UK) and i'm just about to leave work.

But can i stay a big thanks for being the first person with an answer rather
than a question.

Have a good one and i will reply next week and tell you how i got on.