Dell Broadcom NetXtreme Family of Adapters User Manual page 7

Teaming provides traffic load balancing and fault tolerance (redundant adapter operation in the event that a network
connection fails). When multiple adapters are installed in the same system, they can be grouped with up to four teams.
Each team can consist of up to eight adapters, with one adapter used as a standby for Smart Load Balancing and Failover
(SLB) or SLB (Auto-Fallback Disabled) team types. If traffic is not identified on any of the adapter team member connections
due to failure of the adapter, cable, or switch, the load will be distributed to the remaining team members with an active
connection. In the event that all primary adapters fail, traffic will be distributed to the standby adapter. Existing sessions are
maintained with no impact on the user.
Types of Teams
The available types of teams for the supported operating systems are shown in the following table:
Table 1. Types of Teams
Operating
Available Types of Teams
System
Windows Server Smart Load Balancing and Failover
2003 Link Aggregation (802.3ad)
Windows Server Generic Trunking (FEC/GEC)/802.3ad-Draft Static
2008 SLB (Auto-Fallback Disable)
Team adapters using the bonding kernel module and a channel bonding interface. See your Red Hat
Linux
documentation for more information.
Smart Load Balancing
NetWare Link Aggregation (802.3ad)
Generic Trunking
Smart Load Balancing™ and Failover
Smart Load Balancing™ and Failover is the Broadcom implementation of load balancing based on IP flow. This feature
supports balancing IP traffic across multiple adapters (team members) in a bidirectional manner. In this type of team, all
adapters in the team have separate MAC addresses. This type of team provides automatic fault detection and dynamic failover
to other team member or to a hot standby member. This is done independently of Layer 3 protocol (IP, IPX, NetBEUI);
rather, it works with existing Layer 2 and Layer 3 switches. No switch configuration (such as trunk, link aggregation) is
necessary for this type of team to work.
NOTES:
If you do not enable LiveLink™ when configuring SLB teams, disabling Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) at the
switch or port is recommended. This minimizes the downtime due to spanning tree loop determination when
failing over. LiveLink mitigates such issues.
IPX balances only on the transmit side of the team; other protocols are limited to the primary adapter.
If a team member is linked at 1000 Mbit/s and another team member is linked at 100 Mbit/s, most of the traffic
is handled by the 1000 Mbit/s team member.
Link Aggregation (802.3ad)
This mode supports link aggregation and conforms to the IEEE 802.3ad (LACP) specification. Configuration software allows
you to dynamically configure which adapters you want to participate in a given team. If the link partner is not correctly
configured for 802.3ad link configuration, errors are detected and noted. With this mode, all adapters in the team are
configured to receive packets for the same MAC address. The outbound load-balancing scheme is determined by our BASP
driver. The team link partner determines the load-balancing scheme for inbound packets. In this mode, at least one of the
link partners must be in active mode.
Generic Trunking (FEC/GEC)/802.3ad-Draft Static
The Generic Trunking (FEC/GEC)/802.3ad-Draft Static type of team is very similar to the Link Aggregation (802.3ad) type of
team in that all adapters in the team are configured to receive packets for the same MAC address. The Generic Trunking
(FEC/GEC)/802.3ad-Draft Static) type of team, however, does not provide LACP or marker protocol support. This type of team
supports a variety of environments in which the adapter link partners are statically configured to support a proprietary
trunking mechanism. For instance, this type of team could be used to support Lucent's OpenTrunk or Cisco's Fast
EtherChannel (FEC). Basically, this type of team is a light version of the Link Aggregation (802.3ad) type of team. This