Dell Broadcom NetXtreme Family of Adapters Broadcom NetXtreme II Network Adapt - Page 90

Broadcom Teaming Services: Broadcom NetXtreme II Network Adapter User Guide IP IPv6 iSCSI L2 L4 LACP Link Aggregation (802.3ad) LOM MAC NDIS NLB PXE RAID Smart Load Balancing™ and Failover Smart Load Balancing (SLB) TCP TOE UDP WINS WLBS Internet Protocol Version 6 of the IP Protocol Internet Small Computer Systems Interface Layer 2. Used to describe network traffic that is not offloaded, and where hardware only performs Layer 2 operations on the traffic. Layer 3 (IP) and Layer 4 (TCP) protocols are processed in software. Layer 4. Used to describe network traffic that is heavily offloaded to the hardware, where much of the Layer 3 (IP) and Layer 4 (TCP) processing is done in the hardware to improve performance. Link Aggregation Control Protocol Switch-dependent load balancing and failover type of team with LACP in which the intermediate driver manages outgoing traffic and the switch manages incoming traffic. LAN on Motherboard media access control Network Driver Interface Specification Network Load Balancing (Microsoft) Preboot Execution Environment redundant array of inexpensive disks Switch-independent failover type of team in which the primary team member handles all incoming and outgoing traffic while the standby team member is idle until a failover event (for example, loss of link occurs). The intermediate driver (BASP) manages incoming/outgoing traffic. Switch-independent load balancing and failover type of team, in which the intermediate driver manages outgoing/incoming traffic. Transmission Control Protocol TCP Offload Engine. This is the hardware that is capable of handling stateful fastpath offloading of TCP and IP processing. User Datagram Protocol Windows name service Windows Load Balancing Service Teaming Concepts Network Addressing Teaming and Network Addresses Description of Teaming Types TOE Teaming The concept of grouping multiple physical devices to provide fault tolerance and load balancing is not new. It has been around for years. Storage devices use RAID technology to group individual hard drives. Switch ports can be grouped together using technologies such as Cisco Gigabit EtherChannel, IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation, Bay Network Multilink Trunking, and Extreme Network Load Sharing. Network interfaces on Dell servers can be grouped together into a team of physical ports called a virtual adapter. Network Addressing To understand how teaming works, it is important to understand how node communications work in an Ethernet network. This document is based on the assumption that the reader is familiar with the basics of IP and Ethernet network communications. The following information provides a high-level overview of the concepts of network addressing used in an Ethernet network. Every Ethernet network interface in a host platform, such as a computer system, requires a globally unique Layer 2 address and at least one globally unique Layer 3 address. Layer 2 is the Data Link Layer, and Layer 3 is the Network layer as defined in the OSI model. The Layer 2 address is assigned to the hardware and is often referred to as the MAC address or physical address. This address is pre-programmed at the factory and stored in NVRAM on a network interface card or on the system motherboard for an embedded LAN interface. The Layer 3 addresses are referred to as the protocol or logical address assigned to the software stack. IP and IPX are examples of Layer 3 protocols. In addition, Layer 4 (Transport Layer) uses port numbers for each network upper level protocol such as Telnet or FTP. These port numbers are used to differentiate traffic flows across applications. Layer 4 protocols such as TCP or UDP are most commonly used in today's networks. The combination of the IP address and the TCP port number is called a socket. file:///T|/htdocs/NETWORK/BroadCom/71921/NetXtremeII/en/teamsvcs.htm[9/26/2012 3:29:14 PM]