Evaluate This – NIC teaming

In the third in this video series I wanted to show you NIC Teaming..

which is how you can provide a single network interface from multiple interface even if these are from different manufacturers. That's why in the video below I have used some Belkin USB Ethernet adapters combined with the on-board network card on my laptop.

If you want to try this yourselves you would install the hyper-V role on windows server 2012 possibly using the introduction to this series as a guide as well as the introduction to Hyper-V I published yesterday.  You would then create several internal virtual switches in Hyper-V and then create a new virtual machine (VM) with several network cards in it bound to these virtual switches.  There’s one property you’ll want to change in the settings for the VM so that NIC teaming works properly which is to set the network adapter in the VM to be used for NIC teaming:

The two key things to remember about NIC teaming from this are:

• The NIC is available as part of the operating system and is NOT part of Hyper-V per se, so you could use the team for any workload say SQL Server.
• Windows Server 2012 also support several new pass thru technologies to address modern network cards such as SR-IOV and IPsec offloading to improve VM performance in Hyper-V. However if you team these modern interfaces you'll lose these advanced features so what you can do is to put multiple external virtual switches into Hyper-V one for each of the new cards and then use several these interface in each VM and then create the team inside the VM, providing you are running Windows Server 2012, or another operating system that lets you do this.

For further reading there’s a deployment guide you can download here

Finally if you haven’t got a TechNet subscription and want to try this yourselves you can get an Evaluation Edition of Windows Server 2012.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 11, 2012
  Nice post Andrew.

• Anonymous
  January 26, 2013
  Hi, Thanks for the informative post. I have a query here. Is there any way in Hyper V 3 to virtualize the "External Virtual switch". To be more specific to my question. Can I create multiple external virtual switch binding on to a single NIC? Thanks in Advance. Jobish

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2013
  Jobish No you can't do that. The virtual switch you refer to is to preserve network setting for VMs as they move around data centres.  There's no UI for this in Windows Server 2012 only PowerShell, however this is exactly what you set up in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 sp1,  to create networks for when you start managing larger numbers of VMs Andrew