3–Adapter Management Applications
Windows Management Applications
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When the preferred primary becomes operational again, the driver does not
automatically switch back the primary to the active adapter.
Preferred Primary
When the preferred primary becomes operational again, the driver
automatically switches back the primary as the active adapter. The network
traffic resumes to the primary adapter from the standby adapter. The traffic
stays with the secondary adapter only as long as the primary adapter is
down.
Auto Select
Use this option to enable the teaming driver to automatically select the best
adapter based on parameters such as bandwidth, link state, health.
In failsafe mode, the standby adapter could be dissimilar in the individual features
supported and capacity and might come from a different vendor.
All the adapters in the team share a common team MAC address. This is a locally
administered MAC address or can be a default MAC address specified by the
driver. Only one adapter at a time in the team is active for network traffic. No two
same MAC addresses are exposed to the switch at the same time.
Failsafe mode is inherent in all other teaming modes and is switch agnostic.
Switch-Independent Load Balancing Mode
Switch-independent load balancing mode provides a failsafe feature and supports
transmit load balancing. For receive load balancing, use the 802.3ad modes.
In this mode, the outbound traffic is efficiently distributed across the member
adapters to increase the transmit bandwidth. Traffic load balancing is
connection-based to avoid out-of-order packet delivery. The administrator can
select one of the following load distribution types:
Auto Select
indicates that the load is distributed based on the target IP
address (IPv4 or IPv6) and port number. This option ensures a one-to-one
correspondence between a traffic flow and a team adapter.
MAC address based
indicates that the load is distributed based on the target
MAC address.
In switch-independent load balancing, a team receives the traffic on the preferred
primary adapter. If the preferred primary adapter fails, the receive load switches to
a secondary adapter (failover operation). If the preferred primary adapter
becomes operational again, the receive load fails back to the preferred primary
adapter (failback operation). Thus, a switch-independent load balancing team also
behaves like a failsafe team. Each time the preferred primary changes due to
failover or failback, other network elements are notified of the change in the
primary adapter through team gratuitous address resolution protocols (ARPs).
