[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] This nic or that nic? - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA
Wed, May 30 2012 12:41 bradley

This nic or that nic?

When getting your head around networking in HyperV the first time, I find it helpful if your network cards are different manufacturers.  Now in real life this is nearly impossible as the Quad card on most servers means all 4 are the same name.  That said as others have pointed out, even on a production box you can throw in a more generic network card for the management role so you can more easily know which nic is which.

And do you have iLos or Drac cards too?  Even the HP microserver comes with the ability to purchase a $80 remote access card to the hardware.  This is a card that will let you get to the base hardware even if the OS doesn't boot.

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# re: This nic or that nic?

Wednesday, May 30, 2012 6:08 PM by Frederik Duijn

Another alternative for iLo/Drac is intel vPro.

It's intended for workstations, but I'm not sure why, because for small/cheap servers, it's a godsend. It does a lot of what e.g. iLo does as well (remote KVM, remote virtual CD/DVD/Floppy mount, remote poweron/-off/reset, etc), but to use it, you only need a motherbord with in Intel Q-series chipset (which are about ~$10-$15 more expensive than their cheaper counterparts) and a compatible cpu (which in current generation is a core i5).

This means that you can build a cheap SBS server, or storage server (one in which it's ok to use some consumer components) which you can remotely control, remote install the OS even, pretty much as if it had the expensive server-grade OOB management cards in them :)

# re: This nic or that nic?

Thursday, May 31, 2012 5:33 AM by Kenneth Westergaard

Personally I always just unplug each card in turn and name it accordingly to their physical placement.

Ie.

onboard nic port 2

external nic port 1

external nic port 2

# @Ken

Thursday, May 31, 2012 1:37 PM by Joe Raby

Me too!

I would use shortened names though, like "LAN1", "LAN2", etc.  I find that sometimes they aren't numbered the same way on the mobo label as they when Windows enumerates the controllers, which is just asinine.