NIC teaming and VMM

Cheng Wei — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:14:00 GMT

Greetings folks,

NIC Teaming, also called “Load Balancing and Fail-Over” (LBFO) or “Link Aggregation” or “IEEE 802.1AX-2008”, groups multiple interfaces to provide fault tolerance and load balancing for Network Interface Cards (NIC) connecting Windows Server to the network. This aggregation combines the individual capacity of multiple interface cards to form a high performance virtual link so the failure of an individual port or adapter does not cause a loss of connectivity. Below is a picture from Wikipedia.org on how a typical NIC teaming looks like:

The Microsoft support position on NIC teaming for Windows Server 2008 (deployed either in a physical environment or virtualized environment with Hyper-V) is that hardware and driver support is provided by the hardware manufacturer as outlined in KB Article 254101.

Alex, one of our test engineers, spent some time researching Broadcom Advanced Control Suite (BACS) version 11.6.10 with Broadcom Advanced Server Program (BASP) NICs, and found out that he could actually make NIC teaming work with his Hyper-V hosts and have VMM manage the BASP NICs.

Here is the blog he posted for what he has experimented and his step-by-step notes on how he made it work for him.

http://blogs.technet.com/apb/archive/2009/02/25/using-vmm-to-manage-you-hyper-v-nic-teams-created-with-bacs.aspx

Hope this is useful information for you!

Enjoy your reading,

Cheng

Cheng's Random Thoughts on System Management : NIC Teaming

NIC teaming and VMM