Users Guide

11–QLogic Teaming Services
Executive Summary
126 BC0054508-00 J
Teaming Concepts
The concept of grouping multiple physical devices to provide fault tolerance and
load balancing is not new. It has been around for years. Storage devices use
RAID technology to group individual hard drives. Switch ports can be grouped
together using technologies such as Cisco Gigabit EtherChannel, IEEE 802.3ad
Link Aggregation, Bay Networks Multilink Trunking, and Extreme Network Load
Sharing. Network interfaces on Dell servers can be grouped together into a team
of physical ports called a virtual adapter.
This section provides the following information about teaming concepts:
 Network Addressing
 Teaming and Network Addresses
 Description of Teaming Types
Network Addressing
To understand how teaming works, it is important to understand how node
communications work in an Ethernet network. This document is based on the
assumption that the reader is familiar with the basics of IP and Ethernet network
communications.
LOM LAN on motherboard
NDIS Network Driver Interface Specification
PXE pre-execution environment
RAID redundant array of inexpensive disks
Smart Load
Balancing and
Failover
Switch-independent failover type of team in which the primary
team member handles all incoming and outgoing traffic while
the standby team member is idle until a failover event (for
example, loss of link occurs). The intermediate driver (QLASP)
manages incoming and outgoing traffic.
Smart Load
Balancing (SLB)
Switch-independent load balancing and failover type of team, in
which the intermediate driver manages outgoing/incoming traf-
fic.
TCP transmission control protocol
UDP user datagram protocol
WINS Windows Internet Name Service
Table 11-1. Glossary (Continued)
Term Definition