Teaming your network cards basically means installing two NICs onto the same server, plugging them both into the same network, and joining them together in a team. This gives you NIC redundancy in case of a failure, and redundancy is always a great thing!
Steps
- Open Server Manager and from the left-hand pane, go ahead and click on Local Server.
- Near the middle of the screen, you will see a section marked NIC Teaming. Go ahead and click on the word Disabled in order to launch the NIC Teaming screen, as follows:
- Down in the ADAPTERS AND INTERFACES section, drop down the TASKS menu and click on Add to New Team:
- Define a name for your new team and choose the two NICs that you want to be part of it:
- That’s it! NIC1 and NIC2 are now successfully joined together in a team and will work in tandem to make sure you are still connected in the event of a failure.
- If you make your way to the regular Network Connections screen, where you define IP address information, you will see that you now have a new item listed beneath your physical network cards. This new item is the place where you will go to define the IP address information that you want the server to use.
You can create more than one team on a server! When setting up a multihomed server with two network connections, you could easily make use of four NICs and create two teams, each containing two physical network cards.
