3Com 3CR990-TX-95, 3CR990-TX-97 Adding a Secondary NIC to a Group, Install the new secondary NIC

Maintaining Groups 105

■Decide whether groups are to perform load balancing:

■Load balancing groups provide failover and share the network load.

■Resilient server link groups provide failover, but do not share the network load.

■If you plan to form load balancing/failover groups, do not enable TCP/IP checksum offload.

■To use bidirectional load balancing, you must assign a dedicated IP address for each load balancing group. This address must be unique (not used elsewhere on the network).

■Obtain the slot numbers of the NICs. You need these numbers if you are installing more than one NIC. See Obtaining Slot Numbers on page 92 for instructions.

Adding a Secondary NIC to a Group

1Install the new secondary NIC.

Follow the procedures in Installing and Connecting the NIC on page 34.

Connect the new secondary NIC to the network that is used by the group.

2Make the following changes to the AUTOEXEC.NCF file:

■Add or verify the LOAD commands for the LAN drivers for all slot-frame instances.

■Load the same protocols and frame types on the new secondary NIC.

■Add the slot number of the new secondary NIC to the LBRSL GROUP command.

3Reboot the server.

The sample AUTOEXEC.NCF file in the following figure shows a group of three NICs. The primary NIC in slot 10001 is bound to two secondary NICs in slot 10002 and

slot 10003.