NIC Express 2.0
NIC Express provides load balancing and failover in a hardware-independent environment. The product uses an NDIS intermediate driver that performs all functions in NT's kernel mode. NIC Express comes on a CD-ROM that includes extensive online documentation in Adobe Acrobat format and two AVI instructional videos that provide a product overview and setup instructions.
I inserted the NIC Express CD-ROM into the system, and an installation browser window appeared that let me install any NIC Express component and view product documentation and white papers. NIC Express installs a new protocol and adapter but displays only the protocol to the user. You install the NIC Express protocol through the Control Panel Network applet the same way you add any protocol. When prompted, you enter the path to the NIC Express protocol service from the CD-ROM. When the installation completes, you see the NIC Express Setup dialog box, which lets you create multiple segments to which you can add NICs. You must add all the installed adapters to at least one segment. This requirement means that if you want to add a separate adapter for other purposes (e.g., private communications), you must install it after you complete the NIC Express setup. After I added all the adapters, I clicked OK and the system prompted me to reboot.
After I logged on to the server, I reentered the Network applet, opened the properties for TCP/IP, and reviewed the NIC Express Virtual Adapter's settings. The dialog box displayed the Adaptec's four ports as one NIC. This dialog box is also where you can change the virtual adapter's IP address. I successfully pinged the NIC Express Virtual Adapter's IP address to ensure it was working properly.
NIC Express provides a built-in monitoring tool that displays cumulative or per-second statistics for individual LAN connections or for the whole array. You can access the monitoring screen from the Network applet's Protocols tab. The color-coded status dialog box made monitoring the state of each adapter easy. This dialog box shows an icon that represents one of five states for each LAN connection, so you instantly know whether an adapter is working properly. The icons represent the following five states: the adapter is working properly, the adapter has stopped working for the first time since the server booted, the adapter has failed at least once since the last boot, the adapter is currently down and has been down before, and the adapter has failed more than three times in 1 hour. To reset a LAN connection's state after three failures (the default threshold is three, but you can set the threshold to as many as 9999 failures), click the failed adapter on the Advanced tab, then click Reactivate, as Screen 2 shows. You don't have to reboot your system to reactivate the failed NIC.
After I set up the high-performance virtual NIC, I started the Chariot test and used its monitor graph to track NIC Express' performance. Using NetXRay, I saw the test immediately start generating load against the virtual NIC. I toggled between viewing the data that the IP address and the NIC MAC address filtered. Throughout my test, the virtual NIC operated without any problems. Although the input on the primary NIC was initially high, the software eventually load-balanced and used all the NICs evenly. The virtual NIC performed flawlessly and handled all incoming and outgoing data transfers, achieving a maximum throughput of 311Mbps through the virtual adapter.
Next, I removed one of the LAN connections from the switch. Within 2 seconds, NIC Express identified and removed the failed LAN connection from the NIC array and began load balancing the incoming test data to the remaining three connections. When I reconnected the failed connection to the switch, the software took about 1 second to rejoin the connection into the array and rebalance the data across all four NICs. Regardless of how many LAN connections I disconnected, the software continued to service the incoming network requests as long as at least one connection was available. However, the software serviced the incoming requests at a slower speed than when all four NICs were connected.
NIC Express lets you create multiple network segments and add as many adapters as your system can hold to each segment. To set up two segments, I selected the Setup tab in the NIC Express dialog box, selected NIC 1 and NIC 2, and clicked Remove to remove NIC 1 and NIC 2 from the NTLAB segment. Next, in the drop-down text box next to the Add button, I entered ENGINEERING for the new segment's name. I selected both NICs in the Available Adapters dialog box, then clicked Add, Yes to include them in the new segment. Finally, I clicked OK, clicked Finish, and clicked Yes to reboot the system.
The product's Enterprise Manager software lets you manage your NIC Express servers from a Web-based browser in one console. This feature saves you money otherwise spent on travel expenses, lets you proactively monitor all your servers, and helps you leverage your time to ensure the highest availability for your users and clients.
The product supports SNMP traps, which notify you when a LAN connection fails or comes online, and NIC Express writes events to NT's event logs. However, I was disappointed that NIC Express didn't support other alert tools, such as pager or email notification.
NIC Express was easy to install and configure, and I like the ability to create multiple segments with the system's available NICs. This tool is flexible and increases the throughput and fault tolerance of your network servers, and its Web-based monitoring with Enterprise Manager strengthens the software's usability and makes it the best value for NIC load-balancing software. Although high-speed networking is getting cheaper, it's still cost-prohibitive for most companies. You can download a fully functional, 30-day evaluation of NIC Express from IP Metrics' Web site.
The Verdict
After spending many weeks reviewing these tools, I concluded that both are excellent NIC load-balancing products. Thanks to wizards and helpful documentation, setting up each product was easy, and each product was ready for testing within 10 minutes after I started the installation process. And both products did a great job of load balancing the test loads I ran against them.
Balance Suite lets you segment NICs, but this product has problems with the amount of data that you can view simultaneously in the Balance Suite Monitor. In addition, Balance Suite doesn't offer Web-based monitoring.
NIC Express had almost everything I wanted from a software NIC load-balancing solution. Although the internal monitor is attached to the Network applet, you can use NIC Express Enterprise Manager to monitor your servers from a Web browser. In addition, NIC Express produced performance numbers that were slightly faster than Balance Suite's performance numbers.
You can't go wrong choosing between Balance Suite and NIC Express because they offer similar features, but NIC Express' Web-based monitoring feature tips the scale in the product's favor. Regardless of which product you choose to leverage fast performance from your new servers, providing a virtual NIC that can handle the servers' I/O makes sense.