What is NIC Teaming?
A solution commonly employed to solve the network availability and performance challenges is NIC Teaming. NIC Teaming (aka NIC bonding, network adapter teaming, Load balancing and failover, etc.) is the ability to operate multiple NICs as a single interface from the perspective of the system. In Windows Server 2012, NIC Teaming provides two key capabilities:
Protection against NIC failures by automatically moving the traffic to remaining operational members of the team, i.e., Failover, and
Increased throughput by combining the bandwidth of the team members as though they were a single larger bandwidth interface, i.e., bandwidth aggregation.
Many vendors have provided NIC teaming solutions for Windows Server, but these solutions shared many limitations. Those solutions are typically tied to a particular NIC manufacturer, so you cannot always team together NICs from multiple vendors. Many of the solutions do not integrate well with other networking features of Windows Server or with features such as Hyper-V. Finally, each of these NIC teaming solutions is managed differently, and most cannot be managed remotely. As a result, it is not easy for an administrator to move from machine to machine in a heterogeneous environment and know how to configure NIC teaming on each host.