I was having a conversation with an old friend of mine this morning and he brought up the topic of NIC Teamming or
Link aggregation. I don’t know how the copyrights work on being able to upload pictures from Wikipedia so I’ll link to the site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

At first, I just assumed it was done for redundancy, if one NIC failed the other would be able to take over the load. What I didn’t think of is that it can also do load sharing. Hm, assuming you only use one switch it still gives you a single point of failure for the device but, if you seperate it through VLANS and then setup separate routes for the different subnets it would be another way to prevent a network outage.

What I’m wondering is would it be possible to NIC team with dual switches? Unless you had a full power outage wouldn’t that provide the best redundancy? In addition, if you had multiple trunks on a mission critical server it would provide the most efficient load balance as well. From what I’ve read I’ve never seen a dual switch setup implimented but I fail to see why it wouldn’t be possible.

This will be costly but, in a corporate environment, when compared to revenue lost as a result of downtime it has the potential to pay for itself right then.

EDIT: http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-009747.htm – Is a great read to show the different type of teaming modes available. 802.3ad dynamic mode is the only mode that provides both fault tolerance and load balancing