Multipathing and load balancing in windows 2003 is handled by the MPIO driver that is installed when you install the "host" or "full" version install of the MD Storage Manager. There is no need to separately aggregate the NICs to get aggregated bandwith. The driver, by default, uses round robin on all ports connected to a single controller. Also, for a single virtual disk, all IO goes through a single controller and the second controller acts as a redundant path. So, if you have 2x1 Gbps connections to each controller, you will have, at the most, 2 Gbps to each partition. Now, each controller can own virtual disks, so the second controller can own a second partition that will also have a separate 2x1 Gbps connection. You can set up IPs and subnets similar to how you would with a switch as long as you can ping the connecting port. it might make sense to have each NIC on the host on a separate subnet and each port on the MD3200i on the corresponding subnet. This will make it easier while configuring your iSCSI. You can use the MD configuration Utility to set up your iSCSI sessions too    -Mohan
I'd like to connect an MD3200i (with two raid controllers) to one of our Windows 2003 R2 servers without using a switch. After browsing most of the documentation, some things remain unclear to me. I'm new to multipath/load-balancing, and can't figuer out how to set this up. Is it possible to connect 1 host nic to raid controller 0, and another host nic to raid controller 1, and then aggregate the bandwith? Thus having 2Gbs instead of 1Gbs? Or is this only a redundant path sollution, that switches to the other controller if the first line fails.How do i set this up in terms of IP addresses, subnets. And where is the load balancing configuered. Is this explained anywhere in the documentation? I can't seem to find it. I've found some examples that include the use of a switch, but none with direct-attached sollutions. What I would like to do is connect 4 UTP cables from the MD3200i to the host. 2 in the upper raid controller and 2 in the lower raid controller. And using load balancing in such a way that i have 4x1Gbs, resulting in a 4Gbs connection to one partition on the MD3200i. Thanks for any help.
How to set up direct-attached MD3200i load balancing