A technician is tasked with providing network-based high availability to a pair of identical web servers. Which of the following minimum server NIC configurations fulfills these requirements?

Configuring one NIC for multicast and one for broadcast does not describe a valid or recognized high-availability or load-balancing configuration for web servers.

Windows Network Load Balancing and similar NLB solutions can operate on a single physical NIC, distributing incoming client requests across multiple servers using a shared virtual IP address. Each server's single NIC is configured to participate in the NLB cluster, allowing traffic to be balanced without requiring additional adapters. This represents the minimum hardware requirement to achieve network-based high availability across the server pair.

Separating 'network traffic' and 'web traffic' onto two NICs describes a segmentation or redundancy design, not a high-availability load-balancing solution.

Assigning identical MAC and IP addresses to NICs on separate physical servers would cause network conflicts and ARP collisions, making this configuration invalid.