Do I need to have two network cards?

No, but it is strongly advised for best performance. With just one network card, you will not get full network throughput. Each request that arrives at the load balancer must be sent out to a back-end machine. The balancer reads the response and streams it back to the client. With just one network card, this means that each request will, in effect, be transmitted twice across the one connection. So if you had one 100MBit connection, the balancer would be limited to delivering only 50MBits of data. With two network cards, you will get the full 100MBit wire-speed.

Content Manager [Administrator] 12 August 2005