Configuring Network Cards

[Mick Ratigan]

I have a question is it possible to configure 3 to 4 network cards to point to one static IP address? We have a Proliant DL380 G6 E5540 and the software application that is running on the server will only support one network card. We have a total of four cards we are trying to setup the cards for performance reasons either bridging the cards etc.

Thanks

[TTr]

What OS is running on the server? "bridging" the cards is an OS function not an application.
The correct terminology is "link aggregation", "port trunking", "NIC teaming" and it is a two sided setup. You have to not only set up the trunk on the OS but you must check if the LAN switch supports it and may have to enable the ports on the switch as well.

[Mick Ratigan]

The operating system is Windows 2008 R2 standard edition.

[rick jones]

Does your application actually know about network cards, or is the limitation really that it only knows about one IP address? Is it explicitly binding to a specific IP address? Often as not, server applications will bind to a specific port number, but leave the IP address wildcarded and so will accept connection requests to that port number and any IP address assigned to the system.

Or do you mean your application only establishes one connection (presumably TCP)?

If that is the case, teaming is unlikely to do you much good - almost all the bonding/aggregation/teaming software will not spread the traffic of a single "flow" across more than one link in the bond/aggregate/trunk. There is at least one exception in the linux bonding code to do "round-robin" but personally, I do not like it at all - it leads to packet reordering and while TCP will "cope" with that, it does not always make things as one might want.