Q-Logic 3200 Team MAC Address, 2. Windows Teaming Modes, Failover, Switch, System Fault, Load

2–Configuring NIC Teaming/Bonding

Team MAC Address

At initialization, the teaming driver selects the team’s MAC address to be the MAC of one of the teamed adapters. In general, the first adapter to come up is chosen to be the preferred primary adapter. The preferred primary’s MAC address is assigned to the MAC address of the team. Alternately, you can choose any valid MAC address as the team’s static MAC address, also called the locally administered address (LAA). Make sure any provided LAA is unique for the local Ethernet network. This provision gives the system administrator more flexibility in configuring the MAC address for a team when necessary.

Teaming Modes

Teaming is designed to improve reliability and fault tolerance of networks and to enhance performance by efficient load balancing.

The following NIC teaming modes are provided:

Failsafe Mode ensures that an alternate standby or redundant adapter becomes active if the primary network connection fails.

Switch Independent Load-Balancing Mode ensures distribution of transmit loads across the teamed adapters.

Link Aggregation Modes (802.3ad static, 802.3ad dynamic (active and passive Link Aggregation Control Protocol [LACP])) enables the use of multiple adapters together as a single, virtual adapter with the aggregated capacity of its individual adapters.

All team types—failsafe, switch-independent load balancing, and link aggregation—can be heterogeneous as well as homogeneous. Every team must have at least one QLogic adapter.

Table 2-2shows that failsafe and transmit load-balancing modes are switch independent, which means they do not require switch configuration. LACP or 802.3ad require switch ports configured for LACP.

Table 2-2. Windows Teaming Modes

	Failover	Switch	System Fault	Load	Number of
Mode			Tolerance		Ports per Team
	Capability	Dependency		Balancing
			(SFT)		(Range a)
Failsafe	Yes: Layer 2	No	Yes	No	2–16
Transmit load	Yes	No	Yes	Yes: Layers	2–16
balancing				3 or 4
Static	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	2–16
802.3ad

SN0054671-00 A 2-15