Windows Server 2012 can combine up to 32 compatible network cards in teams without additional tools. During setup, you can select whether you want to use the individual adapters in the team as standby adapters to improve availability, or whether you want to combine the speed of the adapters to increase performance. You can only combine Ethernet connections in teams. Bluetooth and WLAN are not supported. Additionally, all network cards must be connected with the same speed.
To create a NIC team, launch Server Manager and click Local Server . By default, NIC Teaming is disabled. To enable the feature, click on the Disabled link. A new window will appear. Here, in the lower right area you can see which network adapters in the server are compatible with NIC teaming. To create a team, just right-click in the Adapters and Interfaces window and select Add to New Team.
The Properties link lets you define additional settings for your NIC team. Windows Server 2012 uses the MAC address of the primary NIC as the MAC address of the team. Core servers also support NIC teams. You can handle the setup either with Server Manager on another server, or you can use PowerShell. In PowerShell, you can use Get-NetAdapter to view the individual team adapter candidates and use Enable-NetAdapter or Disable-NetAdapter to enable or disable individual adapters.
All commandlets for managing NIC teams can be listed using Get-Command -Module NetLbfo . To
create a new team, use the New-NetLbfoTeam
If the team and the associated adapters are shown as active , you can adjust the network settings for the team. To do this, open the adapter settings by entering ncpa.cpl on the welcome page. You can then see the new team. On Hyper-V hosts you can create multiple virtual switches on the basis of the various physical adapters and then create NIC teams within virtual servers. They use the individual virtual switches of the Hyper-V host as their basis.
