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Probing - Probing is another mechanism used to maintain the status of the adapters in a fault tolerant team.
Probe packets are sent to establish known, minimal traffic between adapters in a team. At each probe interval,
each adapter in the team sends a probe packet to other adapters in the team. Probing provides fail over and fail
back for immediate link failures as well as external network failures in the single network path of the probe pack-
ets between the team members.
Fault Tolerance teams include
Adapter Fault Tolerance (AFT)
and
Switch Fault Tolerance (SFT)
.
Load Balancing
Provides transmission load balancing by dividing outgoing traffic among all the NICs, with the ability to shift traffic away
from any NIC that goes out of service. Receive Load Balancing balances receive traffic.
Load Balancing teams include
Adaptive Load Balancing (ALB)
teams.
NOTE:
If your network is configured to use a VLAN, make sure the load balancing team is configured to use the
same VLAN.
Link Aggregation
Combines several physical channels into one logical channel. Link Aggregation is similar to Load Balancing.
Link Aggregation teams include
Static Link Aggregation
and
IEEE 802.3ad: dynamic mode
.
IMPORTANT
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For optimal performance, you must disable the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) on all the switches
in the network when using AFT, ALB, or Static Link Aggregation teaming.
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When you create a team, a virtual adapter instance is created. In Windows, the virtual adapter
appears in both the Device Manager and Network and Dial-up Connections. Each virtual adapter
instance appears as "Intel Advanced Network Services Virtual Adapter." Do not attempt to
modify (except to change protocol configuration) or remove these virtual adapter instances using
Device Manager or Network and Dial-up Connections. Doing so might result in system anomalies.
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Before creating a team, adding or removing team members, or changing advanced settings of a
team member, make sure each team member has been configured similarly. Settings to check
include VLANs and QoS Packet Tagging, Jumbo Packets, and the various offloads. These settings
are available in Intel PROSet's Advanced tab. Pay particular attention when using different
adapter models or adapter versions, as adapter capabilities vary.
If team members implement Advanced Features differently, failover and team functionality will be affected. To avoid
team implementation issues:
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Use the latest available drivers on all adapters.
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Create teams that use similar adapter types and models.
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Reload the team after adding an adapter or changing any Advanced Features. One way to reload the team is to
select a new preferred primary adapter. Although there will be a temporary loss of network connectivity as the
team reconfigures, the team will maintain its network addressing schema.
Primary and Secondary Adapters
Teaming modes that do not require a switch with the same capabilities (AFT, SFT, ALB (with RLB)) use a primary
adapter. In all of these modes except RLB, the primary is the only adapter that receives traffic. RLB is enabled by
default on an ALB team.
If the primary adapter fails, another adapter will take over its duties. If you are using more than two adapters, and you
want a specific adapter to take over if the primary fails, you must specify a secondary adapter. If an Intel AMT enabled
device is part of a team, it must be designated as the primary adapter for the team.
There are two types of primary and secondary adapters:
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Default primary adapter:
If you do not specify a preferred primary adapter, the software will choose an adapter
of the highest capability (model and speed) to act as the default primary. If a failover occurs, another adapter
becomes the primary. Once the problem with the original primary is resolved, the traffic will not automatically
restore to the default (original) primary adapter in most modes. The adapter will, however, rejoin the team as a
non-primary.
