Windows Server 2012 : Creating a NIC Teaming

NIC bonding/NIC Teaming/network adapter teaming is a commonly used solution to solve the network availability and performance challenges in a networked server environment. NIC teaming  is the technique to configure multiple NICs as a single interface from the perspective of the system.

Windows Server 2012 comes with an integrated network adapter  teaming solution that is quite easy to setup and manage.
This is vendor independent, and it supports the performance optimization. NIC Teaming can be configured with the click of a mouse using highly user friendly GUI.

In Windows Server 2012, NIC Teaming is a feature of the windows operating system. In the past,  for NIC Teaming we were depending on network adapter vendor driver support and then you would only team that vendor's NICs. In Windows Server 2012 we can team any NICs from any vendor.

As per Microsoft  "Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming is unique and hardware-independent, which provides transparent network fail-over and bandwidth aggregation. This can be easily deployed under all existing workloads and applications on both physical and virtualized servers".

The NIC Teaming configurations GUI on Windows Server 2012 can be invoked from Server Manager or by invoking lbfoadmin.exe at a command prompt.

IF you have any existing network teaming configuration, that will be displayed under the "TEAMS" section. if you are going to create a new NIC Teaming, select "New Team" from TASKS

This will pop the New Team configuration dialogue.Key in the required team name as per your choice.

Select the network adapters which you want to be teamed together.

Set additional properties to change the modes and properties of the teaming to support your need.

Once the team is setup, access local server properties and check the teaming configuration. You can make necessary changes and additional items based on your requirement later. The MAC address of the team is the MAC address of the first NIC in the team that we see after a server reboot.  If we want a static IP address for the team we can also assign it directly to the team using network configuration screen.

Below screen shows you the number of NIC Teaming present in your server and the properties of the configuration.

Once the team is setup, we can check the properties from the the team properties.

Happy Teaming! :)