NIC Teaming

Moving on to another network topic that is becoming more and more popular on server hardware, let's walk through the steps to create NIC Teaming. The ability to team NICs together essentially consists of binding two or more physical network interfaces together so that they behave as if they were a single network interface within Windows. This allows you to plug in two physical cables to two different switch ports, all using the same settings. That way, if one NIC port or switch port or patch cable goes bad, the server continues working and communicating without hesitation, because the teaming allows the NIC that is still working to handle the network traffic.

NIC Teaming itself is nothing new. It has been around for 10 years or more inside the Windows Server operating system. However, early versions were problematic, and in the field, I find that Server 2016 is the earliest server operating system most IT personnel consider to be stable enough to use NIC Teaming in production...