Question

Reply to the following questions in full paragraph form:

What is NIC Teaming and how can we use it to optimize an enterprise network environment?

How does NIC teaming differ from technologies such as PAgP and LACP?

Provide a scenario where NIC Teaming would be desirable?

Answer 1

Dear User,

Part A

Network Interface Card (NIC) Teaming is an inbuilt feature of Windows server 2012 and on words also known as Load Balancing/Failover (LBFO) can work on physical as well as virtual machines.
Up to 32 ethernet adapters can work together as a team because of NIC teaming.
NIC teaming has following benefits which are being used to optimize an enterprise network environment.
1. Bandwidth aggregation,
2. Traffic Failover and
3. Load Balancing
NIC teaming helps to aggregate the bandwidth from multiple network adapters by combining the bandwidth of all the team members which increase the throughput (performance) also in case any network adapter failure allows the server to tolerate NIC, protecting against NIC failure by automatically moving the traffic to other operational team members.

Part B

LACP is a vendor-independent protocol that helps to handle the grouping of multiple ports. It has two modes, Active and Passive.
PAgP is Cisco proprietary negotiation protocol. Port Aggregation Protocol is used to achieve the same goal as LACP. It also has two modes Desirable and Auto.
Both the protocols are functionally same except the different mode names.
LACP is the part of NIC teaming which can be selected as a Teaming mode on Windows server.

Part C

Private clouds or corporate cloud refers to a model of cloud computing is one of the best examples where NIC teaming would be desirable.

Thank You !