Info about Network Interface Card Teaming

NIC teaming is a built-in feature of Windows Server 2012, and allows you to provide fault tolerance for your network adapters. NIC teaming allows multiple network interfaces to work together as a team, preventing connectivity loss if one network interface card fails. It allows a server to tolerate network interface card and port failure up to the first switch segment. NIC teaming also allows you to aggregate bandwidth from multiple network adapters, for example, so four 1-gigabit (Gb) network adapters can provide an aggregate of 4 Gb/second of throughput.

• The advantages of a built-in teaming solution are that it works with all network interface card vendors, spares you from any potential problems that proprietary solutions cause, and provides a common set of management tools for all adapter types.

• You can configure outbound traffic to be distributed among the available network adapters by using modes for network traffic distribution. These modes keep all packets that are associated with a single flow (TCP stream) on a single interface, which minimizes the possibility of out-of-order packet arrival scenarios. The NIC teaming feature uses the following modes for network traffic distribution.

• Source and destination MAC addresses
• Source and destination IP addresses with or without considering the MAC addresses (2-tuple hash)
• Source and destination TCP ports, usually used along with the IP addresses (4-tuple hash)

The 4-tuple hash creates a finer distribution of traffic streams, resulting in smaller streams that can be independently moved between interfaces. This algorithm is not compatible with IPsec; if IPsec is deployed, this algorithm reverts to a 2-tuple hash.

• Broadcast mode. This mode broadcasts all packets on all interfaces. It does not balance the network traffic load and it causes a need for significant extra processing to drop duplicate packets at the receive side.

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In addition, the NIC teaming feature uses the following two sets of configuration modes for use with switches:

• Switch-independent modes. These modes make it possible for network interface card team members to connect to different switches because the switch does not know that the interface is part of a team at the host. These modes do not require the switch to participate in the teaming.

• Switch-dependent modes. These modes require the switch to participate in the NIC teaming. Here, all interfaces of the team are connected to the same switch.

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