NIC Teaminng

[Greg Woodroffe]

I have a customer who wishes to buy a compaq server and wishes to utilise the 'nic teaming' software to load balance between the network cards.

The two 'physical' network cards will be connected to different Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches.

I have configured teaming to 'fail on fault' (where the switch would only see one active path to the server) but have never configured in load balancing mode (where the switch would see two active paths to the server).
My understanding of switching is that the switch would 'block' one of these paths to avoid routing issues.

So my question is, will this happen and if so, what will need to be done to the switch configuration to support load balancing?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Greg

[Ken Henault · Accepted solution]

Look at ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/servers/networking/TeamingWP.pdf

What you're looking for is called switch-assisted load balancing.