User guide

User Guide NetXtreme II
September 2013
Broadcom Corporation
Document INGSRVT78-CDUM100-R Load Balancing and Fault Tolerance Page 9
LOAD BALANCING AND FAULT TOLERANCE
Teaming provides traffic load balancing and fault tolerance (redundant adapter operation in the event that a network
connection fails). When multiple Gigabit Ethernet network adapters are installed in the same system, they can be grouped
into teams, creating a virtual adapter.
A team can consist of two to eight network interfaces, and each interface can be designated as a primary interface or a
standby interface (standby interfaces can be used only in a Smart Load Balancing™ and Failover type of team, and only one
standby interface can be designated per SLB team). If traffic is not identified on any of the adapter team member connections
due to failure of the adapter, cable, switch port, or switch (where the teamed adapters are attached to separate switches),
the load distribution is reevaluated and reassigned among the remaining team members. In the event that all of the primary
adapters are down, the hot standby adapter becomes active. Existing sessions are maintained and there is no impact on the
user.
NOTE: Although a team can be created with one adapter, it is not recommended since this defeats the purpose of
teaming. A team consisting of one adapter is automatically created when setting up VLANs on a single adapter,
and this should be the only time when creating a team with one adapter.
TYPES OF TEAMS
The available types of teams for the Windows family of operating systems are:
• Smart Load Balancing and Failover
• Link Aggregation (802.3ad) (TOE is not applicable)
• Generic Trunking (FEC/GEC)/802.3ad-Draft Static (TOE is not applicable)
• SLB (Auto-Fallback Disable)
SMART LOAD BALANCING™ AND FAILOVER
Smart Load Balancing™ and Failover is the Broadcom implementation of load balancing based on IP flow. This feature
supports balancing IP traffic across multiple adapters (team members) in a bidirectional manner. In this type of team, all
adapters in the team have separate MAC addresses. This type of team provides automatic fault detection and dynamic
failover to other team member or to a hot standby member. This is done independently of Layer 3 protocol (IP, IPX,
NetBEUI); rather, it works with existing Layer 2 and 3 switches. No switch configuration (such as trunk, link aggregation) is
necessary for this type of team to work.
NOTES:
• If you do not enable LiveLink™ when configuring SLB teams, disabling Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) or
enabling Port Fast at the switch or port is recommended. This minimizes the downtime due to spanning tree
loop determination when failing over. LiveLink mitigates such issues.
• TCP/IP is fully balanced and IPX balances only on the transmit side of the team; other protocols are limited to
the primary adapter.
• If a team member is linked at a higher speed than another, most of the traffic is handled by the adapter with the
higher speed rate.