Dual Nic or Single Nic?

[thomasf]

I bought all these servers; actually a rack full of servers to resell (and yes keep for myself:banana: ) from a huge search engine company to fund my hosting project. I noticed they only had one NIC cable connected to each server. There was a 2nd NIC onboard however they didn't use it or have ever used it and it does work. Being a well know search engine company, why would they not utilize the 2nd NIC? Does it really matter if your colo has multiple failover network connections through one NIC? Am I missing something? And it's not the first time I heard of people giving a rats A$# about a 2nd NIC for redundancy. Any comments / suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

[woooo]

2nd NIC is for mostly private connectivity server =to=server

[hostdime-roman]

I think two NIC is almost used for local connections / LAN.

[mr_brain]

Use second nic.

Make sure that onbaord nic are not the cheap ones, as they cause cpu-load.

[synapse]

Have you tried setting up the 2nd card as a failover?

[gate2vn]

We use the 2nd NIC for gigabits connections between web and database servers, for internal management, backing up...

[orderdynamics]

The second NIC is good to use for out of band stuff like backups. Definately server-to-server should be factored in and probably isolated off backups/management too. NIC teaming/bonding/failover is a good idea if you're in a single server environment, but I wouldn't go down this road unless you have a good managed hosting partner or internal skills as the moment it has problems it can really complicate things.

[damansk]

As indicated by our friends, the 2nd NIC is for a private network which the service providers use to do backups or monitoring etc.

For redundant network providers, the larger service providers to a blending of multiple carriers using BGP and providing to your servers on the single NIC.

Hope this helps.

[crazed-jesse]

We use onboard for local and high end pci nic for external access

[envisage]

We use anywhere between 2 and 10 NIC's but yes to answer your question, backup NIC's are always a good idea. Just be sure to check and make sure those unused ports aren't actually iLO ports though :)

[jewin]

I'd definitely go with dual NICs. Aside from private networking, it will also allow you to use KVM/IP if you have an internal IPMI card.

[Adler01]

I'd definitely go with dual NICs. Aside from private networking, it will also allow you to use KVM/IP if you have an internal IPMI card.

Cant you still do that with the single one as well?

[nxserve]

2nd NIC is almost always used for private (server to server) connections as others have said. Also, if it was a large search engine company, they probably had fail over before the servers to other clusters, before the connection even hit the NIC.

[hostingguy12]

The second NIC is used for private server to server. I have also heard this as another failover port. If the current NIC fails the other one is used for Failover. I would check with you company and ask what the plan on doing with your second port.

[infinitienet]

I would use the second for failover unless a customer wants a private connection between a couple servers.

[~ServerPoint~]

You will have more privileges using Dual Nic instead of single one. ;)