No MAC address showing in redundant team NIC

[DaveSheeran]

Hi,
All our servers are currently configured with a "Fault Tolerent" team. when I get a report of active network ports from the network team none of the ports with the failover NIC connected show up as having a MAC address, is this normal functionality? if so is there a way to force the redundant NIC to show it's MAC address?

[Cederberg]

Hi!

As the Team is built on the principal that it should appear as one NIC only one of the NICs in the team can present it self with the "virtual" MAC adress the Team is assigned.

If this logic is completly correct it would be impossible to force the redundant NIC to show the MAC adress as it is shared between NICS in the team and would make your network infrastructure go crazy and not knowing where to send the IP packages...

[Lmm_1]

When a team is created, TCP/IP stack will be bound to the team, it will take the MAC address of the first NIC by default, for the rest of the network it will be seen as a single NIC, just 1 MAC address can be used, the other port will reaming on standby mode till the acutal NIC fails, then the MAC address will be bound to the other port.

[DaveSheeran]

Firstly, thanks for the replies. Is it not the case when setup in failover only mode that the "spare" NIC has a different MAC address and that when a failover occurs then the 2 NICs swap MAC addresses?

[Lmm_1]

The MAC address actually belongs to the team, there is no need for the physical NIC to swap MAC address.

[DaveSheeran]

This is how i understood it to work and it explains why networks ports are having problems as they are set to auto-disable after a certain time when no device is connected, so the port the failover NIC is connected to is disableing it's self. thanks again for the info.