How many nic's can a server have , if more than one how are IP's assigned , if i ping which IP will it show show ..Please can anyone explain the working.

I am going to break this up into bullet points to best answer your questions:

Q: How many NICs can a server have?

A: This is going to be determined by the manufacturer and how many physical ports are available for your NICs.

Q: If more than one NIC, how are IPs assigned?

A: IP addresses are assigned static or dynamic IP addresses. If the adapter is connected to network with DHCP, it will get a DHCP address automatically otherwise if no DHCP server on the network you will need to manually assign the IP address to the adapter.

Q: If I ping, which IP address will it show

A: This is going to be determined by your DNS settings. If you ping the NetBIOS or FQDN of the machine, it will perform DNS lookup and will call out to the DNS server to identify the IP address associated with the name. Whatever is returned in DNS is what will display for the ping. So next time you ping and the DNS and previous DNS response has expired, it may return back a different IP address.

Everything Adam said is correct (of course).  A little more detail for those who want it.  (Using Adam's broken out questions as the base.)

Answer 1: A server may have up to 64 NICs subject to physical constraints of their system.  The NICs may be physical or virtual.  Installing more than 32 NICs may cause the system to boot and run slower than you like.

Answer 2: Everything Adam said, kind of.  Technically a NIC doesn't have an IP address.  A NIC has a MAC address.  Each TCP/IP compartment bound to the NIC gets one or more IP addresses (by default one compartment with one address is bound to the physical NIC).  In the case of Hyper-V there are no TCP/IP compartments bound to the physical NIC and thus no IP addresses are associated with the physical NIC - the TCP/IP compartments are all bound to virtual NICs exposed by the Hyper-V switch and there may be a very large number of virtual NICs, none, some, or many of which are in the host operating system, and all virtual NICs (host OS or guest OS) all send and receive traffic through the same physical NIC or team of physical NICs. 

Answer 3: Exactly what Adam said.

Thanks Adam!

Much useful.

Hello Don,

Thanks a ton for the answer , Much helpful.

can you please eloborate what does TCP/IP compartment mean here.

Is that some thing like , assigning seperate IP to each applications, cluster environment deployed in server etc......please eloborate.

Thanks in ad

Hi Paramesh,

TCP/IP compartment is a component of Windows.

As Don mentioned, NIC doesn't have IP address itself.

NIC is bind with TCP/IP compartment and IP address is assigned to TCP/IP compartment.

Then, in OS, it looks like that the IP address is assigned to NIC.

Best Regards,

Leo