Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013

Host Resiliency with NIC Teaming

NIC Teaming gives the ability to bond multiple high-speed network interfaces together into one logical

NIC to support workload applications that require heavy network I/O and redundancy (Figure 18).

Windows Server 2012 offers fault tolerance of network adapters with inbox NIC Teaming. This provides

advanced networking capabilities to aggregate bandwidth from multiple network adapters and traffic

failovers to prevent connectivity loss (so that failure of one NIC within the team does not affect the

availability of the workload).

Figure 18: NIC Teaming in a virtual machine configuration

The built-in NIC Teaming solution in Windows Server 2012:

 Works with all network adapter vendors.

 Eliminates potential problems caused by proprietary solutions.

 Provides a common set of management tools for all adapter types.

 Is supported by Microsoft.

The solution also works within a virtual machine hosted on Hyper-V by allowing virtual network adapters

to connect to more than one Hyper-V switch and still have connectivity even if the NIC underlying a

certain switch gets disconnected. NIC Teaming uses two basic sets of configuration algorithms to provide

better flexibility when designing networking for complex scenarios: switch-dependent mode and switch-

independent mode.

Switch-dependent mode: These algorithms require all the network adapters of the team to be connected

to the same switch. Two common ways in which the switch-dependent mode can be configured are as

follows:

 Generic, or static, teaming (IEEE 802.3ad draft v1) requires configuration on the switch and

computer to identify which links form the team.

 Dynamic teaming (IEEE 802.1ax, LACP) uses the Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) to

dynamically identify links between the computer and a specific switch.

Switch-independent mode: These algorithms do not require the switch to participate in the teaming. The

team network adapters can be connected to different switches because a switch does not know to which

network adapter it belongs.