NIC Teaming User Guides for Windows Server 2012 Products Now Available in TechNet Gallery

Network Interface Card (NIC) Teaming, also known as load balancing and failover (LBFO), allows multiple network adapters on a computer to be placed into a team for the following purposes:

  • Bandwidth aggregation

  • Traffic failover to prevent connectivity loss in the event of a network component failure

NIC Teaming has been a requirement for independent hardware vendors (IHVs) to enter the server network adapter market, but until relatively recently, NIC Teaming has not been included in Windows Server operating systems.

Fortunately both Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 include NIC Teaming capabilities, and the product teams for those technologies have created two terrific user guides to help both novices and experts with NIC Teaming.

The guides provide information about NIC Teaming architecture, bandwidth aggregation mechanisms and failover algorithms, as well as a NIC Teaming management tool step-by-step guide. The guides also contain information about NIC feature support, including stateless task offloads and more complex NIC functionality.

You can download the guides from TechNet Gallery in Word format at the following locations.