Hi All
I am looking at setting up NIC teaming on a Windows Server 2012 box. The server in question has 4 NICs.
Switch connectivity will be into 2x Enterasys S4 Core switches, which are not chassis bonded so are not seen as one entity (so like having 2 separate switches, but on the same network).
Traditionally when I've had to connect servers to both cores, I would use active/passive, with one connection going to each core. However I have been asked by a customer to make use of Windows Server 2012 teaming, and they want to do similar with 4x NICs.
When I've used two or more 'active' NICs in the past, I've relied on LACP, configured on the switch with actor and partner admin keys, which has worked fine. However I've not had to do this in conjunction with a passive/failover connection to a second switch before. Reading between the lines of lots of forums, it looks like a common choice would be to try setting a team of NICs to switch independent with address hash. Would this solve what I am trying to do, without having to make any config changes to my switches? Ideally i'd like to have 2x NICs active to core switch 1, and 2x NICs on standby on core 2, but again i'm unsure if more than 1x nic can be defined on windows server 2012 as the standby adaptor?
Hope this all makes sense? Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Rob