Using 2 Ethernet Ports on Mac Pro

Howdy:

I was asked to find out about this, and thought it would be easy to answer, but searching the docs & forums wasn't successful. We have been testing Parallels 3 (XP VMs on Mac OS X Tiger & Leopard) with an eye to hopefully rolling it out department-wide, but have run into a roadblock. Our engineering folks have instituted what they call "Network Access Controls" and one result of this is that only one IP can be run over a given Ethernet port, which evidently prevents running Parallels, at least the way it is configured currently here.

This is not really my area of expertise, but I was asked if, on the Mac Pro, it could be configured so that the Mac used one of the two built-in Ethernet connections and XP used the other. Then they could be plugged into different ports, bypassing the restriction. My initial reaction was "probably not" because I believe that on the Mac side only one interface can be active at a time (except for link aggregation). But since I'm not a network expert and know little about Parallels, I agreed to verify this. (Note that using Ethernet for one and a wireless link for the other is also not possible, since wireless networking is also banned for security reasons.)

Can anyone give me a definitive answer as to whether this is possible?

Thanks!

 

Please create ticket in support and let one of you network engineers contact support in ticket,
I will provide build which allows such combination,
I guess you are in Cisco switching environment
Let me know ticket ID here I respond in

 

John: I created a support ticket, #594407. I sent the contact info for our tech support person in the reply to the ticket's confirmation email. If you need me to send his contact info to you, please email me directly. (I didn't want to put his phone & email address on the forum.)

Thanks for your assistance!

-- MLJ