Considerations on using multiple NICs on the SMP Server
Article ID: 255558
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
The customer wants to know if there are considerations that they should take into count on having multiple NICs on the SMP server and if we have issues if they don't specify one of those NICs for our communication with SQL server, clients, and site servers.
Environment
ITMS 8.6
Resolution
This article is not intended to be an official support statement but a quick reference of what we have seen on some simple testing.
After quick tests when on the existing running ITMS VM machine added 2nd network adapter hasn't seen any problems, because:
We don't know which IPv4 will be resolved for NS Server (from NIC1 or NIC2) by managed client computer or remote Site Server since they are using NS FQDN/Hostname.
Many years ago during scalability tests, we used "NIC teaming" functionality on installed NS and remote SQL where both had 2 NICs with different VLANs and it worked fine.
Note:
In the case of "Microsoft Load Balancer" usage on the Notification Server, this might cause unnecessary work on client computers and unnecessary sending of basic inventory, since SMA detects NS IP changes very often (Probably sometimes the same could appear if NS has multiple network adapters and client computer will resolve NS hostname by different IP addresses, therefore I would not suggest using multiple NIC on NS and first identify current problems "NS too busy" etc)
Example of a client computer which communicating with ITMS where MS Load balancer is running
We have the functionality to control downloading from NS (allow/disallow) so client computers will never download packages from NS (only Package Servers can still download from NS) as well as to control overall transfer size to avoid 100% NIC usage.
All current downloading and history can be viewed using default reports (under Reports>Notification Server Management>Server>Subnets and Sites Info)
Additional Information
We have some articles referring to multiple NICs on client machines:
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleId=170157
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleId=176880
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