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I use a HP ProLiant DL385 G5p server and it has 4 network ports. What is the reason for this? Can anyone help?

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Out of the box it should have only 3: one iLO port, and two NIC ports. Do you want more ports? – sysadmin1138♦ Mar 27 '11 at 21:07
The reason is in case you want to use more than one network connection. There are several things that can benefit from a server with several network connections (proxy server, firewall, virtualisation platform are just 3 examples that spring to mind). – DJ Pon3 Mar 27 '11 at 21:43
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2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

The DL385 G5p has the following setup:

enter image description here

Items #11, #12, #17 and #18 in the diagram below are the four NIC ports. There's also a dedicated ILO2 port at #16. The reason for the number of NIC interfaces on this server is its intended use as a virtualization platform (up to 128GB RAM, good PCI expansion and lots of other options). Having a good number of onboard NICs is handy for VMWare and such. If in doubt or if you don't need that number of interfaces, just use the first LAN port for your needs.

HP DL385 G5p quickspecs.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13161_div/13161_div.HTML

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up vote 4 down vote

How about redundancy? I am not sure any serious datacenter today has systems with just one physical network interface. One interface is a sure single point of failure. More interfaces means you can have parallel feeds to two separate switches, perhaps in two separate areas in the datacenter, reducing your SPOF. Throughput is obvious as well. If you need to increase throughput, you need to bind NICs together. More NICS = better!

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