Is there a relationship between the network adapter binding order and route table metric on Windows Server 2008 or 2012
I was told that the binding order is related to the routing metrics in the route table, such that interfaces with a higher binding order will have lower routing metrics (i.e. be more preferred)
I checked on a couple of windows 2008 / 2012 boxes but I can't see any relation, nor can I understand why the two should be related at all? Routing metric is a cost associated with following a particular network route, whereas binding order (in my understanding) is where network services will prefer to attach themselves to first?
Best Answer
The relationship between the adapter and bindings in order of preference does have an influence of the metric value of any nic card if set to automatic metric, ie the card higher up in the bindings should carry a higher priority. However if you decide to start adding your own routes be it static or persistent with a high metric value set to like 1. Then you can override this default behavior.
Though recently we had to setup some persistent routes during a cluster migration as it was better than trying to add two default gateways on a disjointed network. Most of the traffic worked as expected, though we found that some issues with QOS and VLAN tags and the odd services within the cluster AP services would ignore the routing. To address this we did have, to change the nic binding order also which fixed the remaining issues. So in summary – Most of the time your be fine just making changes the metrics or adding routes of your own to get the desired effect, but if things all even and on auto metric then the card in the highest order should take preference with higher weight. But then we are talking about Microsoft who have stopped BSOD on Windows 8, by changing it to an orange screen with white lines.