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NIC Teaming

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Jun 1, 2004
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I'm a novice at Cisco but want to know if it's possible for the Catalyst 2950 to support Network Teaming by a server. I want to use the HP NIC TEAM protocal so that I can provide redundancy to my servers.
 
I believe hp nic team is the same as etherchannel in cisco speak so if that is the case then the 2950 does support LACP which is the standards based etherchannel you would use .
 
Yes the 2950 supports LACP , etherchannel in cisco speak .
 
Server teaming is different than Etherchannel.

Teaming is essentially invisible to the switch and requires no switch configuration.

Etherchannel on the other hand would configuration on both the server and the switch, but I haven't seen server admins using this since gigabit interfaces came out. The benefit in speed is negligible and the fault tolerance isn't really any better than teaming.
 
Thanks for the quick responce, As far as routers we have 2600 and 2800. Any issues with those systems? Reason I'm asking is that I'm being told by my network guy that the router and switches do not support Teaming.
 
good point vipergg,

if its just redundancy that is desired, "Network fault tolerance (NFT)" would be fine and requires nothing from the switch. I believe this might be the default, because every server on my network is like this.

If its load balancing, then one of the variants of "Switch-assisted Load Balancing" would be in order and would require something on the switch. But again, the last time I did this was probably 5 years ago, before gigabit interfaces.
 
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