Dell QLogic Family of Adapters QLogic QME8242 Mezzanine Card User's Guide - Page 65

Windows Teaming: QLogic QME8242 Mezzanine Card User's Guide Back to Contents Page Windows Teaming: QLogic QME8242 Mezzanine Card User's Guide Overview Teaming Modes Using the CLI for Teaming Using the Team Management GUI Teaming Configuration Viewing Teaming Statistics Overview You can group together multiple network adapters in a server to make a team. Individual adapters that are part of a team operate as a team rather than standalone adapters. A team provides traffic load balancing across the member adapters and fault tolerance when some, but not all, of the members lose connectivity. To enable teaming functionality, install the teaming driver in addition to the basic NIC. 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 1 shows that Failsafe and Tx load-balancing modes are switch independent, which means they do not require switch configuration. LACP or 802.3ad requires switch ports configured for LACP. Table 1. Windows Teaming Modes Mode Failover Capability Failsafe Yes: Layer 2 Tx load balancing Yes Static 802.3ad Yes Switch Dependency No No Yes SFT (System Fault Tolerance) Yes Yes Yes Load Balancing Number of Ports per Team (Range*) No 2-16 Yes: Layers 3 or 4 2-16 Yes 2-16 file:///T|/htdocs/NETWORK/QLogic/71922/en/teaming.htm[9/26/2012 4:25:57 PM]