Are Dell R610 4 Port NICs as good as a Second NIC in terms for Redundancy

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So my general question is does a multiple port NIC supply the same redundancy that two complete NICs do? My Specific question is in what is the case with the 4 port NIC that comes in Dell R610s.

I know we can all guess that the separate NICs are better and don't have shared components, but does anyone actually know?

I know in the end you want multiple servers etc, but I still think it is nice to have redundant NICs setup in a server as well. I'd rather not debate this topic, my interest is in the two different NIC setups.

Best Answer

What's the saying about famous saying about eliminating single points of failure... "Oh, that way madness lies"?

The 4 port NICs on the R710 servers, of which I have several out in the field, are a single Broadcom PCIe device with 4 individual PHYs. A single failure of a PHY probably won't take out the entire device, but a driver going flaky well could. If you're concerned about driver failure you might want to put another, non-Broadcom, NIC in one of the PCIe slots.

I'm running my R710's on VMware ESXi and using 3 of the NICs for connection to the LAN and 1 for the service console. When I get an iSCSI SAN at one of the Customer sites I'll be adding a dual-port PCIe NIC to service the SAN. I've been happy with the configuration, though I don't have NIC-level redundancy for the service console.