I have two NICs that are connected to two different subnets. Both subnets have a router with Internet access. I am wondering how Windows server 2012 is handling Internet access. Is it going to use the faster connection or the one that was setup first?
Is there a way to define which one it is going to use for Internet access? Also I’d like to know if it is possible to tell Windows which NIC to use when it is told to connect to a VPN.
Is it just me or is there an influx of these sorts of posts recently? The ones where the question should really be how the hell the OP got into that sort of mess in the first place…
This is not how you manage multiple internet connections. Why are you connecting a windows server to a dial in VPN?
I am aware of metric and the route command. What I don’t understand is how I can tell Windows to use NIC1 for the VPN and NIC2 for Internet access when they both are actually told to send data to a public ip. Is there a way to define metrics for different protocols? Maybe I’m over thinking this…
According to Microsoft:
Should still be working in 2012R2 (at least it does on Win8.1)
But this only sets priority for ALL traffic
You don’t connect one interface to a VPN and another interface to a LAN. A VPN is just that, a virtual network. It sits itself on top of your LAN connection and diverts all non-local traffic through a tunnel to your VPN endpoint. Unless you’re connecting to a VPN without split-tunneling, in which case it will only add one or several explicitly defined routes to your routing table, depending on the setup.
There has to my knowledge never been a Microsoft product that allows for multihoming (two or more networks with co-existing default gateways). You need networking equipment running stateless routing protocols like BGP, which is actually designed to allow many paths to a destination.
You are just set a route with better metric to the VPN gateway in one of the NICs, when you dial the VPN connection it should use this NIC to reach the gateway and establish the connection
After that the VPN client should add routes with lower metric on this NIC (check this and correct if you have to) and use this NIC henceforth for VPN traffic