rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO
 ·Charter Pipeline
| reply to Noah Vail
Re: Wooo.
WinTel data center servers typically use two NIC cards and a driver that "teams" the cards for enhanced throughput and high availability. However, I believe this is done at the driver layer and not the OS layer. I think it also has to have the blessing of the switch at layer 2 since I think a virtual MAC address is involved.
Microsoft also has a poor man's load balancing feature where two servers share a MAC address and listen to all the packets but this wouldn't help in this case.
I don't know how the Windows routing table works. I know you could put the same default gateway in for each card and I suppose giving it the same metric might make Windows round robin (RR). If it does RR, it might only do so with five different apps and/or destinations. Windows may have an affinity with a single application and/or single destination always routing down one NIC. If it does RR this way, it would work for multiple concurrent destinations and/or applications but it wouldn't aggregate a single application's download from a single site.
Take all of this with a grain of salt. I know enough about infrastructure to be really, really dangerous but that's about my limit. I'm by no means an expert. |
