NIC Teaming in Windows Server 2019

John Burris 1 Reputation point
2021-11-21T15:20:46.85+00:00

Hey Everyone,

I am trying to configure a NIC Team in Server 2019 and I have seen others ask the same question but have never seen an answer.

My NIC Team consists of 4 NICs and the server is using DHCP. Every time the server reboots, the NIC Team randomly selects one of the 4 MAC addresses and changes it's IP address based on the DHCP reservation. How do you configure the NIC Team to a single MAC address so the IP address stays the same?

My first attempt to solve was to configure one of the NIC physical MAC addresses on the NIC Team but this fails because you have now introduced a duplicate MAC address. Is the solution to use a MAC address generator or something and assign a random MAC address to the Team? My first attempt at that didn't seem to work in that the Team didn't use the assigned MAC address and instead continued randomly rotating the physical MAC addresses instead.

Any thoughts on this or solutions others have used are appreciated.

John

Windows for business | Windows Client for IT Pros | Networking | Network connectivity and file sharing
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  1. Gary Reynolds 9,621 Reputation points
    2021-11-23T01:37:08.59+00:00

    Hi @John Burris

    As you are using DHCP reservations and this is a server, what's the requirement to use DHCP? The simpler option would be use static IP addresses, then you don't have to worry about which card is selected first or MAC addresses?

    Gary.

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  2. John Burris 1 Reputation point
    2021-12-13T20:07:15.973+00:00

    Hi Gary,

    Thanks for the response - I opened a case with Microsoft and discussed and in the end we did use a static IP address. We could not figure out why exactly why using a generated MAC address would not work when robbing one form the physical adapter did. It's possible it was security policy but didn't pay to spend a lot of time tracking it down when using a static IP address worked instead.

    Thanks again,

    John

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