Hi guys,

I have a server which has 4 network ports (redundancy purposes). each pair is connected to one subnet. meaning;

eth0 and eth1 connected to 192.168.10.x
eth2 and eth3 connected to 192.168.20.x

while this ensure redundancy (if one down, naturally it will go the other port.. right?), how do I make sure it transfer data via both ports simultaneously? To ensure.. 'speed'.

Possible?

The speed limit on ethernet is set by the standard. That is, the slowest part of ethernet is actually the speed on the wire, not processing it on the PC, so I can't imagine any situation where it would be desireable to have two NICs transmitting on the same segment.

As for having an automatic backup, that's an interesting idea, but I've never heard of anyone doing it. For one thing, ethernet hardware seems to be reliable--much more reliable than hard disks, for example. For another, I don't know how you would configure it or how you would detect whether a failure is caused by local hardware or by some other hardware on the segment.

To acheive redundancy you need the ports to be running VRRP so that your host address doesn't change when the i/f goes down. That would give you redundancy. To acheive load balancing where you can use both i/f simultaneously you would need to employ bonding. The network device you are connected to also needs to support bonding. Cisco calls this etherchanneling and Nortel calls it trunking.

You can acheive a semblance of load balancing, termed load "sharing" by giving each i/f a different address and have half your hosts talk to one i/f, etc. To do this with redundancy you need to use two vrrp adresses with a different i/f as primary.

woah... that's deep.

hmm we were advised to use 2 interfaces by our partners... but from how i see it, like quite redundant.

i'm using dell servers with their onboard ethernet cards.. so is there any ready solution out there i can use such that i can load balance them?