HP Integrity rx2800 HP Integrity Network Adapter Teaming Whitepaper - Page 31

event, because the protocol address is directly assigned to the Intermediate (teaming) driver, and not to the Miniport driver. When transmitting frames, the current Primary adapter always transmits using the team's MAC address as the Layer 2 address and the team's Protocol address as the Layer 3 address. Non-Primary adapters always transmit using the MAC address assigned to them by the teaming driver and using the team's protocol address as the Layer 3 address. For NFT and TLB, the MAC address used by Non-Primary adapters when transmitting is always different from the Primary adapter's MAC address and is always unique from that of any other Non-Primary adapter, to comply with IEEE standards. For SLB, the additional switch intelligence allows all teamed ports to transmit using the same MAC address, the team's MAC address. A network device communicating with an HP network adapter team may receive frames from more than one network adapter in the same team. When this happens, the network device does not know that more than one MAC address is being used. The important issue is that all frames originating from the same HP network adapter team use the same protocol address. The network device does not know that multiple MAC addresses are coming from the team because MAC headers are stripped off before the frames are processed up the stack by the operating system of the network device. When the operating system receives the frames, they all appear as though they came from the same network adapter. In addition, ARP cache entries are not created by examining the MAC addresses from received frames. ARP cache entries are ONLY created from ARP requests and ARP replies or from manually creating static entries. With the exception of Dual Channel, the team always sends ARP replies using the same MAC address. This allows the team to be known by one MAC address to all network entities. Types of HP Integrity Network Adapter Teams There are seven team types for HP network adapters: Network Fault Tolerance Only (NFT), Network Fault Tolerance Only with Preference, Transmit Load Balancing with Fault Tolerance (TLB), Switch-assisted Load Balancing with Fault Tolerance (SLB), Switch-assisted Dual Channel Load Balancing, 802.3ad Dynamic with Fault Tolerance, and Automatic. While there are seven different team types, there are three base team types from which all other team types are derived. The three base team types are NFT, TLB, and SLB. Respectively, each mode gains in features and incorporates most features from the previous teaming mode. In other words, NFT is the simplest teaming mode, supporting only network adapter fault tolerance. TLB supports network adapter fault tolerance plus load balancing of any traffic being transmitted from the server. SLB supports network adapter fault tolerance, load balancing of any traffic transmitted from the server, plus load balancing of any traffic received by the server. For a graphical overview of team types and functionality, refer to Figure 3-4. Network Fault Tolerance Only (NFT) Network Fault Tolerance (NFT) is the foundation of HP Integrity Network Adapter Teaming. In NFT mode, two to eight ports are teamed together to operate as a single virtual network port. However, only one network port, the Primary port, is used for both transmit and receive communication with the server. The remaining ports are considered to be in standby (or secondary ports) and referred to as Non-Primary ports, and remain idle unless the Primary port fails. All ports may transmit and receive heartbeats, including Non-Primary ports. Types of HP Integrity Network Adapter Teams 31