DL380 G2: Teaming Gigabit and Fast Ethernet NICs

[Stephen Kebbell]

Hi all,

I have a customer with a DL380 G2 currently using both onboard NICs (NC3163) as an NFT Team, to 2 seperate switches for redundancy. OS is Win2003 Server. They want to upgrade to Gigabit ethernet, e.g. NC7170 or NC7770. I know it's no problem to team a Gigabit and a Fast-Ethernet in an NFT team, and even in a TLB Team, but my question is about the performance.
Will the gigabit card really transmit at 1000Mbit/s (or close enough to it) if it's in a TLB-team with one of the NC3163s, resulting in an aggregate transmit speed of 1100Mbps? The HP's teaming whitepaper states that TLB "Can team adapters operating at different speeds as long as the adapters support a common speed. The adapters don’t have to be operating at the common speed."

Thanks in advance.
Steph

[Connery]

Better late than never...

When NICs of desparate speeds are teamed together in a TLB team, only ports running at least as fast as the Primary port will be used.

EXAMPLES:

TLB Team:
Primary = 1 Gbps (transmit, receive)
Secondary = 100 Mbps (standby)
Secondary = 100 Mbps (standby)

TLB Team:
Primary = 100 Mbps (transmit, receive)
Secondary = 1 Gbps (transmit)
Secondary = 100 Mbps (transmit)

TLB Team:
Primary = 1 Gbps (transmit, receive)
Secondary = 1 Gbps (transmit)
Secondary = 100 Mbps (standby)

[Stephen Kebbell]

Wow, I posted that question almost a year ago? Doesn't seem that long :-)
Thanks for your information.

Stephen