Dell Intel PRO Family of Adapters - Manual (Page 26)

l Preferred Primary/Secondary adapters: You can specify a preferred adapter in Intel PROSet. Under normal
conditions, the Primary adapter handles all traffic. The Secondary adapter will receive fallback traffic if the
primary fails. If the Preferred Primary adapter fails, but is later restored to an active status, control is auto-
matically switched back to the Preferred Primary adapter. Specifying primary and secondary adapters adds no
benefit to SLA and IEEE 802.3ad dynamic teams, but doing so forces the team to use the primary adapter's
MAC address.
To specify a preferred primary or secondary adapter in Windows
1. In the Team Properties dialog box's Settings tab, click Modify Team.
2. On the Adapters tab, select an adapter.
3. Click Set Primary or Set Secondary.
NOTE: You must specify a primary adapter before you can specify a secondary adapter.
4. Click OK.
The adapter's preferred setting appears in the Priority column on Intel PROSet's Team Configuration tab. A "1" indic-
ates a preferred primary adapter, and a "2" indicates a preferred secondary adapter.
Failover and Failback
When a link fails, either because of port or cable failure, team types that provide fault tolerance will continue to send
and receive traffic. Failover is the initial transfer of traffic from the failed link to a good link. Failback occurs when the ori-
ginal adapter regains link. You can use the Activation Delay setting (located on the Advanced tab of the team's prop-
erties in Device Manager) to specify a how long the failover adapter waits before becoming active. If you don't want
your team to failback when the original adapter gets link back, you can set the Allow Failback setting to disabled (loc-
ated on the Advanced tab of the team's properties in Device Manager).
Adapter Fault Tolerance (AFT)
Adapter Fault Tolerance (AFT) provides automatic recovery from a link failure caused from a failure in an adapter,
cable, switch, or port by redistributing the traffic load across a backup adapter.
Failures are detected automatically, and traffic rerouting takes place as soon as the failure is detected. The goal of AFT
is to ensure that load redistribution takes place fast enough to prevent user sessions from being disconnected. AFT sup-
ports two to eight adapters per team. Only one active team member transmits and receives traffic. If this primary con-
nection (cable, adapter, or port) fails, a secondary, or backup, adapter takes over. After a failover, if the connection to
the user-specified primary adapter is restored, control passes automatically back to that primary adapter. For more
information, see
Primary and Secondary Adapters .
AFT is the default mode when a team is created. This mode does not provide load balancing.
NOTES
l AFT teaming requires that the switch not be set up for teaming and that spanning tree protocol is turned
off for the switch port connected to the NIC or LOM on the server.
l All members of an AFT team must be connected to the same subnet.
Switch Fault Tolerance (SFT)
Switch Fault Tolerance (SFT) supports only two NICs in a team connected to two different switches. In SFT, one adapter
is the primary adapter and one adapter is the secondary adapter. During normal operation, the secondary adapter is in
standby mode. In standby, the adapter is inactive and waiting for failover to occur. It does not transmit or receive net-
work traffic. If the primary adapter loses connectivity, the secondary adapter automatically takes over. When SFT teams
are created, the Activation Delay is automatically set to 60 seconds.
In SFT mode, the two adapters creating the team can operate at different speeds.
NOTE: SFT teaming requires that the switch not be set up for teaming and that spanning tree protocol is turned
on.