NIC's and SBS server 2003

[hoemee]

Hello all,

Working on a SBS 2003 machine which has onboard NIC connection and another NIC card installed. Currently, the onboard NIC is not being used - everything is going through the add on card. My question is - should both NIC's be used? Would this improve performance? Like putting the internet connection from the router into the onboard NIC and the add on card connection to the network switch...

Thank you

[mbossman2]

ICS is generally not as efficient as a dedicated router (specialized equipment beats out generalized equipment every time).

2 reasons that you would use multiple nics:

• VLANs - where you don't have a switch that supports VLAN trunking
• Redundancy - multiple paths, through 2 switches, onto the network in case of the failure of one of the switches