Teaming Multiple NICS for additional bandwidth?

I'm not 100% positive, but I don't believe you'll gain any bandwidth by doing this.  I could be wrong, but NIC teaming is usually used for load balancing which means that the server/driver will send x number of packets out one nic, then send x number out the next nic and so on, it will never (again to the best of my knowledge) send packets out all of the NICs at the same time.  I would think the only real way of doing this if at all, is to trunk a couple of ports on the switch to allow them to be combined, however, I have never seen this work outside of expanding bandwidth between switches.

Again, I could be wrong.

It should be possible.  Here is how our previous configuration was used.

Our DS server had 4 NICs, 3 of which were active.  1 for what we call "RiceNet1" which was a 128.x.x.x, 1 for "RiceNet2" which was 10.x.x.x and then 1 for a dedicated iSCSI connection to a storage array.

The DS server was located on RiceNet2, but the computers in RiceNet1 were not able to talk to RiceNet2.  It was oneway traffic only.  We fixed this by adding in the RiceNet1 dedicated NIC in the server so that all RiceNet1 traffic was routed through to it.  That meant we were able to image simultaneously with RiceNet1 to RiceNet1 and RiceNet2 to RiceNet2 and max out both connections.  However, that was 2 point to point connections it seems and all done through trickery.

we do it here at work for terminal servers.  to increase the bandwith you need to first load a driver nic teaming utility.  in the case of broadcom they have a seperate application and intel builds it into their drivers.  you can team the NIC's together and this turns the 2 physical NIC's into a single virtual nic with one IP and (virtual) mac address.  then configure the switch to place the two (or more) teamed ports into a single IGMP group.  your bottleneck will likely be further down the pipe though, likely the switch uplink.  we are using a gb switch with 10gb backbone so we actually see an improvement

Thanks so much fellas.  I fired off some requests to the networking guys here and hopefully can try something.  Thanks again!  If anyone else has any other thoughts, please feel free to chime in!

Hey Everyone, I spoke with networking and they wanted to know if Altiris supports LAPC or PAGP?  They are open to the idea of teaming up our Altiris servers for more speed, but if Altiris can do either of those methods if would help them out a lot.  Thanks all.

I works with HP servers and HP has a nice little aap that allows you NIC teaming.  I hear that Windows 2008 server, not sure if R2, has this build in?

Nelo