NIC teaming

[William Ren]

we need combine 2 NIC card together to increase data flow. Do they have to connect to the same switch or can go to 2 switches? Can traffic fail over to another card after 1 card fail when connect connect to 2 switches? Thanks for suggestions.

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

You need to purchase an HP product called Auto-Port Aggregation (APA). This will do exactly what you are trying to do; it will combine multiple NIC's into a single MAC address and also provides transparent failover. If one of the ports/cables fail the link stays up at reduced throughput.

Note that APA is only supported on certain swutches. Search for Auto-Port Aggregation and docs.hp.com and you should find everything that you need.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Oops, I missed a part of your question. APA does require that the combined ports connect to a common switch. If you are need more robust failover then you need to examine MC/ServiceGuard.

[Sajid_1]

Hello,

Yes, APA will do the task for you as suggested by Clay. If you are connecting to two switches, that makes a redundancy there in case of a switch failure. Read this about APA:
http://www.docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/J4240-90016/J4240-90016.html