Multiple NIC's with BE 2010?

[MitchR]

I have a media server with multiple drives, and at night the NIC is hovering around 98% utilization on our gigabit network.

The obvious answer is to use multiple NICs.  I understand that pre-2010, you could only manually select specific NIC's for specific jobs or policies.  There was no way to tell BE to just load balance all jobs between all NICs.

Has anything changed in 2010?   What's the best way to tackle this bottleneck?
 

[teiva-boy]

 The best way is to use the new Dedupe functions in BE2010.  You should see your network traffic reduce by 10x or more.  

Other than that, you could have used multiple NIC's, Jumbo frames, and dedicated backup LAN's.

[MitchR]

Ah, but that's my question - what's the best way to use multiple NICs?  Am I still stuck with manually assigning a random NIC with each job, and hoping it load balances out?

[teiva-boy · Accepted solution]

Why could you not use NIC teaming in the server?  This would allow you to trunk or load-balance NIC's, and to BE, it would show up as a "Virtual NIC," in most cases.

Most NIC teaming or trunking applications that come with your normal HP/Dell/ etc server makers give you the choice of failover or load balancing.  If your server doesnt support it, then look at buying an Intel server NIC with dual ports.