From the course: Windows Server 2019: Advanced Networking Features

Configuring NIC Teams - Windows Server Tutorial

From the course: Windows Server 2019: Advanced Networking Features

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Configuring NIC Teams

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- NIC Team, sometimes called NIC Teaming, joins multiple network cards together into one aggregate connection for fault tolerance, redundancy, and an increase in speed, when a single NIC is not enough for your traffic. We're in our 2019 server, in Server Manager. We'll click on Local Server, and we'll see NIC Teaming is disabled. We'll select that, and we see our server has been added. If we need to add another server or a different server, we can just click on Tasks, and add servers here. Now we'll go to the left-hand side, towards the bottom where it says Teams, and under Tasks, we'll click on a New Team. And under the New Team, we're going to call this NIC Team. And you can see we have several different network cards to choose from. Let's choose the Q Logic One and Two, and if you look below, we see Additional Properties we can also set. We have a few different options here under Teaming Mode, such as the default, Switch Independent, Static Teaming, and LACP. Static Teaming requires configuration on the Switch, and the computer, to identify which links form the team. Because this is a statically configured solution, this is a switch dependent mode of NIC Teaming. The next one is Switch Independent, and again, that is the default, and it allows you to distribute the NICs in your team across numerous network switches in your environment. And the last option, LACP, provides the link aggregation, and allows for the expansion and reduction of the NIC Team. This is also a switch independent mode. We'll stick with the default Switch Independent, and we see Load Balancing mode, and we have the option for Dynamic, Hyper-V Port, or Address Hash. We'll start with Address Hash. This is how you configure your team to load balance network traffic between the NICs in the team. In Hyper-V load balancing, we'll load balance your traffic by VM. With Hyper-V Port, each VM will transact on a separate NIC, but the downside is that each VM will only transact over a single NIC. If you have multiple virtual NICs in your VM, and they are teamed, Hyper-V Port may be the best choice. Address Hash will be the best option that allows your virtual machine to still access the network in case the NIC the virtual machine is utilizing fails. We'll choose the dynamic option. The advantage to Dynamic Mode re-balances loads in real-time so that a given outbound flow may move back and forth between team members. Now we have the option for the standby adapter, and right now all of our adapters are set to Active, although you could say one is going to be active, and the other is going to be standby. The advantage of leaving both active is you get twice as much speed. The advantage to choosing one active means that the other one is not being used all that often, and therefore may last longer. We don't have multiple VLANs in our setup, so we'll just go ahead and choose the default VLAN, and click Okay. Now you may see that the status is showing up as red for a few seconds, and then eventually it will turn green, assuming that the network adapters are working properly. And our NIC Team status is now set to Okay. If we go into the Network and Sharing Center, and then eventually to the Network Connections, we see our Q Logic One and Two network cards, and we also see something new. We see NIC Team, and it's enabled. Now, remember, our cards are both set to one gigabit, so let's right-click on our team, and we see the speed is now two gigabits. So our aggregation worked. NIC Teaming is a great way to greatly increase your speed and bandwidth in a heavily used network.

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