Nate Wolter

Configure Network Interface Card (NIC) Teaming in Virtual

Machines
As defined by Microsoft, network interface card (NIC) teaming allows
multiple network adapters on a computer to be placed into a team. NIC teaming is
also known as bonding, balancing, and aggregation.
There are two major advantages of NIC teaming. The first is an increase in
performance due to bandwidth aggregation. The second advantage is fault
tolerance because if one NIC goes down, the remaining functioning NICs will take on
the remaining traffic.
NIC teaming has two different modes. The first mode, Switch-dependent
mode, requires the switch to participate in the teaming procedure. Usually this
mode requires all the network adapters in the team to be connected to the same
switch. The second mode, Switch-independent mode, unlike switch dependent, does
not require the switch to participate in the teaming process. Of the two modes,
switch-independent mode is the recommended option as it provides traffic failover
in the event of a switch failover.
To use NIC teaming in Hyper-V, you must have completed all three of the
following tasks:
1. Create the NIC team in the Windows Server 2012 R2 host operating system.
2. In Hyper-V Manager, create an external virtual switch using the NIC team.
3. Configure the virtual network adapter in a VM to connect to the virtual switch
representing the NIC team.
Like most features on Microsoft Windows 2012 R2, there are cmdlets which
can be used in Powershell if you do not feel like using the GUI, and NIC teaming is

no different. There are not too many cmdlets, but the list below provides the meat
and bones of what you need to know anyway.

Add-NetLbfoTeamMember Adds a new member (network adapter) to a

specified NIC team.

New-NetLbfoTeam Creates a new NIC team.
Remove-NetLbfoTeam Removes the specified NIC team from the host

The cmdlets are sort of difficult to remember because NIC is not in any of
them. One other term NIC teaming is known as is load balancing and failover
(LBFO). If you can remember that alternate name, it will make the cmdlets a lot
easier to remember as well.