A very nice new feature in Windows Server 2012 is native NIC teaming. This means you can create a team of different NIC’s, without instelling any 3th party drivers or software! Even with different NIC families, for example Intel and Broadcom. Cool!
Within a few clicks, youre NIC team is up and running. Offcourse you can also use PowerShell to manager or create a NIC team. Let’s have a look on some examples from my labenvironment. I’ve created a virtual Windows Server 2012 machine whit a copple of NIC’s in it.
1.) To list all adapter in the machine, you can use the following command
Get-NetAdapter
2.) Rename the adapters
Rename-NetAdapter -Name OLDNAME -NewName NEWNAME
In my example I’m going to create a team of 4 network interfaces (TEAM-INT1,2,3 and 4)
3.) The next step is to create a new team interface
New-NetLbfoTeam -Name LAN-TEAM -TeamMembers TEAM-INT-1, TEAM-INT-2, TEAM-INT-3
As you can see, I’ve only added 3 NIC’s to the team. In the next step, we’re going to add another NIC to the team.
4.) Next we are going to add TEAM-INT-4 to the LAN-TEAM
Add-NetLbfoTeamMebmer -Team LAN-TEAM -InterfaceAlias TEAM-INT-4
5.) Let’s view the team properties
Get-NetLbfoTeam -Name LAN-TEAM
As you can see, all the 4 NIC’s are member of the NIC team
6.) Open the Server Manager and select “Local Server”
7.) Select “NIC Teaming” Here you can edit the properties of your NIC team and see the status of each interface (speed, status, etc.)
8.) When we disable one interface, you see the new status directly
So in this exmple, you have seen how easy it is to build a new NIC team with different NIC’s. No special drivers, no tooling, no 3th party software…just Windows Server 2012!! #cool!
