December 3, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Our servers have dual onboard NICs. I would like to use one to connect to the network, and the other to connect to another server via a crossover cable. I would like to be able to point backups to use the direct connection for faster data transfer. Has anyone done this, or know where I can find out more?
Thanks!
December 3, 2007 at 12:37 pm
You can do this, though I'd suggest not using a crossover cable and setting up a small hub/switch with a network in between. You might find this makes more sense as you could easily add other servers to this "management" network.
I've done this before, just bind a separate network (new IP/subnet) to the 2nd NIC, then SQL Server will see it (as will Windows) and you can run the backups through this network.
Note that with today's network speeds, you might not really see any performance gains with this.
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December 3, 2007 at 2:05 pm
This is more of a networking question than anything else.
That being said: if you are to dual-home your server, you need to assign an IP that is not in the same subnet as the primary NIC, so that the server knows that you're "going somewhere else". You may also need to manually edits your HOST file, so that you can assign a new alias to the new destination, so that your server knows which connection to use.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
December 3, 2007 at 3:34 pm
This is actually very useful for BACKUPs that you may want to make accross the network!!
* Noel
December 3, 2007 at 4:38 pm
That's what I used to do! Back when we had 10Mbps NICs 🙂
We used a 192.168.2.xx network to the firewall for public access.
We had a 192.168.3.xx network to our internal network (through another router) and that way we didn't confuse any access. Backups ran locally and were copied through the .3 network, everything else through the .2
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July 7, 2011 at 1:30 pm
i want to do something similar.
have two SQL08R2 on Windows08R2. primary and mirror.
i'd like one nic to be used for SQL network traffic (IIS to/from), and second nic for the mirroring traffic, backups, etc.
how do i direct the mirroring and backup traffic to the 2nd nic? what governs it? windows OS? SQL?
is there a 2nd nic in SQL server best practices?
July 7, 2011 at 2:04 pm
While SQL may know about this second NIC it isn't really all that important. This is much more of a networking question than anything.
As long as both NICs are on seperate SUBNETs, like Steve's example anytime you reference an address on the "mangement" subnet traffic will flow through that NIC. However, you will probably NOT want to reference servernames when you desire traffic to travel over this NIC. The reason is that if all the machines participating in this little scheme are dual-homed (two NICs, each on a different subnet) then you cannot guarantee what the name will resolve to without additional tweaks. For example machine ABCSQL01 has two nics, 192.168.2.105/255.255.255.0 and 192.168.3.109/255.255.255.0, and machine DEFSQL02 has two nics 192.168.2.106/255.255.255.0 and 192.168.3.125/255.255.255.0. If you ping ABCSQL01 from DEFSQL02 what IP address will you get? you can't guarantee which you will get without additional work. Either you have to adjust the hosts file on each of these to make sure that name resolutions between them ALWAYS resolves to the management subnet OR you have to reference by IP address.
I agree that a cross-over cable is not a good idea either. Put a small switch in, its cheap.
I also offer another solution, in most cases if you have two NICs on a card you can team them and in effect 2 x 1GBs NICs become 1 x 2GBs NIC. In the end you don't quite double your available bandwidth but it is a heck of a lot easier to do this than the other things above..
CEWII
July 11, 2011 at 12:43 am
I've got Servers with multiple NIC's on multilple vlan's configured for backups.
NIC 1 - 10.10.0.x Vlan 1
NIC 2 -- 10.10.9.x Vlan 9
In DNS I've also added new entries for both servers.
eg, sql1.domain.com(10.10.0.x) and I've added a second entry sql1backup.domain.com(10.10.9.x)
Make sure your routing is confiured correctly on both servers....test your routing with pathping.
Eg. pathping 10.10.9.x , should go over NIC 2
You can also add persistent routes on each server
route -p add 10.10.9.0 mask 255.255.255.0 10.10.9.x(IP of second NIC)
Hope this helps
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