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Is there any reason NOT to team a high quality 4-Port NIC with one of the on-board ports on the motherboard?

I am considering adding one of the on-board ports to the 4-Port for redundancy, but I wanted to make sure that it would not impact performance negatively at all.

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You can team across onboard and expansion adapters without consequence. But it really depends on what you're trying to protect against.

In general, NIC failure is pretty rare, and if your onboard server NIC or NICs go bad, you likely have bigger problems that would entail unplanned service disruptions.

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  • Well the ports are there, so I thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to add one to protect against NIC failure. So then on the rare chance it does happen, we can still have a functioning server until we can bring it down to remedy the problem. I just wanted to make sure that adding the on-board NIC link to the faster dedicated NIC card wouldn't have any negative consequences. – Litzner May 2 '14 at 16:05
  • For onboard NICs, the problem is rarely isolated to the interfaces alone. You're typically talking about a system board replacement. That's why I don't think this method of teaming is a useful means of protection. However, that said, there's absolutely no harm in doing so. – ewwhite May 2 '14 at 16:06
  • You can't always team across adapters depending what OS you are running and what adapters are installed. For example, prior to Windows 2012's built in teaming, you had to use 3rd party teaming software which didn't always play nicely together across different NIC chipsets. – Rex May 2 '14 at 16:10
  • @Rex I assumed Linux. – ewwhite May 2 '14 at 16:11

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