Broadcom NIC teaming

[SaintJames]

I've read the instruction on load balancing and created a team, I've configured TCP/IP but what do I do with the other 2 adapters.

I'm running a Power Edge 2650 with 2 Broadcom nics and W2K.


Help

 

[NickFerrar]

Hmm haven't teamed Broadcom adaptors but when I've done it with Intel Pro 100's the teaming creates a new virtual adaptor and the original 2 disappear (they are visible either through Intel's PROset utility or if you break the team).

If once you team with the Broadcom you can still reconfigure the team members individually that sounds a bit daft as you could break the team without realising it.

 

[SaintJames]

I don't know what hapeend the first time I try to set up the teaming but now I only have tcp/ip configuration for the team. I still find that network browsing is just as slow as it was before. Why is this now that the Os belives that there is only one adapter.

 

[NickFerrar]

I really only adaptor team to give some fault tolerance - running network monitor on some of our busiest file severs with just a single 100Mb NIC shows they aren't being stressed (I think most of the bottleneck probably comes from the IO overheads of dealing with multiple simultaneous requests).

If you're going to team for performance you should make sure you have a NIC bottleneck before teaming, if you don't then you can't really expect an improvment after teaming...

 

[TheMunger]

When you team 2 or more adapters you are creating a VLAN (virtual LAN). You are basically telling the OS to listen on all adapters as though they were one. This teaming causes your system to have a faster response time via load balancing, in most cases fault tolerance (based on how smart the teaming software is) which takes over if one of your adapters dies or a network config gets broken.

Once the team is created, one of the easiest is the broadcom software and it even allows for different adapters, your other REAL adapters should not be edited directly. The configuration on the virtal adapter is the ip address you want the world or other servers/workstations to see. So if you are using this machine as a server, everything must be updated to reflect this new ip address. DNS, DHCP scopes, WINS, etc.

 

[peterve]

just my 2 cents
does your switch support teaming (resilient links) ?

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