This has got me confused. I'm setting up a Windows 2008 server box and I have two nics in this server. I want redundancy so I've got two seperate networks, one on each NIC. I thought it would be no problem that Windows should be smart enough to use the first adapter first. Well this is not the case, so I found out how to adjust the binding order and the 2nd adapter was indeed first in the binding order. So I changed it so the first adapter is first in the binding order then restarted the server. Now even though the first adapter is first in the binding order it is still using the 2nd adapter in connections first... why? This makes no sense, why have a binding order you can change if it is just going to be ignored? Out of curiosity I set up a Windows 7 box and it did the same exact thing. How can I fix this so that the first adapter in the first binding order spot gets used first?Steven Hickerson

That sounds a good idea in theory but it rarely works in practice. Multihoming a server usually causes more problems than it solves. How are the networks set up? Are they using different IP subnets? One problem is name resolution. If the machine name resolves to a particular IP address, the data will be sent through the NIC which is in that subnet. If the name never resolves to an IP in a particular subnet then the NIC which has an IP in that subnet will never be used. If a client uses DNS to find the server and DNS returns an address of say 192.168.21.21, the client will send the traffic to 192.168.21.21. Bill

Hi Steven, Thank you for your post. You could make use of DNS Round Robin and Enable netmask ordering feature to set up two DNS A records point to separate IP address to reach your goal. But for some reasons like it need some time to failover, Microsoft recommend customers to use third party NIC teaming for NIC failover. If there are more inquiries on this issue, please feel free to let us know. Regards, Rick Tan