The Network Administrator

After building my new 64bit 2008 web server I never got around to enable the nic teaming. The steps for implementing this might be different depending on the manufacture of the network interface cards I have Intel nics. The first thing to do is to make sure that you have the correct driver for your nic to support the advanced functions such as teaming. Then go into the properties of one of the nics and select configure, select teaming, select new team and choose the nics that would want in the team. Now you can go to your network connections and you will see three interfaces for the Team. I like to rename the two nics that make up the virtual nic as a and b and then call the virtual nic public. You can then select the properties of public and set the correct settings such as ip, dns, gateway, etc.

The last thing to do is configure the port aggregation for each interface on the switch that the nics are connected. I have my server connected to a Cisco catalyst 2924. I will be using Fast ethernet ports 21 and 22.  This command needs to be issued on both fast ethernet interfaces  ”port group 1 distribution destination” without the quotes. For better performance I have also disabled spanning tree on each port 21 and 22, this is done by issuing the no spanning-tree command on each interface.