Dell Broadcom NetXtreme Family of Adapters - Manual (Page 69)

Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet Teaming Services: Broadcom NetXtreme BCM57XX User Guide
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Link Aggregation is similar to Generic Trunking except that it uses the Link Aggregation Control Protocol to negotiate the
ports that will make up the team. LACP must be enabled at both ends of the link for the team to be operational. If LACP is not
available at both ends of the link, 802.3ad provides a manual aggregation that only requires both ends of the link to be in a
link up state. Because manual aggregation provides for the activation of a member link without performing the LACP message
exchanges, it should not be considered as reliable and robust as an LACP negotiated link. LACP automatically determines
which member links can be aggregated and then aggregates them. It provides for the controlled addition and removal of
physical links for the link aggregation so that no frames are lost or duplicated. The removal of aggregate link members is
provided by the marker protocol that can be optionally enabled for Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) enabled
aggregate links.
The Link Aggregation group advertises a single MAC address for all the ports in the trunk. The MAC address of the Aggregator
can be the MAC addresses of one of the MACs that make up the group. LACP and marker protocols use a multicast destination
address.
The Link Aggregation control function determines which links may be aggregated and then binds the ports to an Aggregator
function in the system and monitors conditions to determine if a change in the aggregation group is required. Link
aggregation combines the individual capacity of multiple links to form a high performance virtual link. The failure or
replacement of a link in an LACP trunk will not cause loss of connectivity. The traffic will simply be failed over to the
remaining links in the trunk.
SLB (Auto-Fallback Disable)
This type of team is identical to the Smart Load Balance and Failover type of team, with the following exception—when the
standby member is active, if a primary member comes back on line, the team continues using the standby member rather
than switching back to the primary member. This type of team is supported only for situations in which the network cable is
disconnected and reconnected to the network adapter. It is not supported for situations in which the adapter is
removed/installed through Device Manager or Hot-Plug PCI.
If any primary adapter assigned to a team is disabled, the team functions as a Smart Load Balancing and Failover type of
team in which auto-fallback occurs.
Software Components
Teaming is implemented via an NDIS intermediate driver in the Windows Operating System environment. This software
component works with the miniport driver, the NDIS layer, and the protocol stack to enable the teaming architecture (see
Figure 1 ). The miniport driver controls the host LAN controller directly to enable functions such as sends, receives, and
interrupt processing. The intermediate driver fits between the miniport driver and the protocol layer multiplexing several
miniport driver instances, and creating a virtual adapter that looks like a single adapter to the NDIS layer. NDIS provides a
set of library functions to enable the communications between either miniport drivers or intermediate drivers and the protocol
stack. The protocol stack implements IP, IPX and ARP. A protocol address such as an IP address is assigned to each miniport
device instance, but when an Intermediate driver is installed, the protocol address is assigned to the virtual team adapter and
not to the individual miniport devices that make up the team.
The Broadcom supplied teaming support is provided by three individual software components that work together and are
supported as a package. When one component is upgraded, all the other components must be upgraded to the supported
versions.
Table 3 describes the three software components and their associated files for supported operating systems.
Table 3. Broadcom Teaming Software Component
Software Component Broadcom Name Windows Linux
Miniport Driver Broadcom Base Driver
B57xp32.sys
B57w2k.sys
B57amd64.sys
B57xp64.sys
tg3
Intermediate Driver Broadcom Advanced Server Program (BASP)
Baspxp32.sys
Baspw2k.sys
Basamd64.sys
Baspxp64.sys
bonding
Configuration User Interface Broadcom Advanced Control Suite (BACS) BACS N/A
NDIS 6 Driver
Windows Vista and later x86 driver
Windows Vista and later x64 driver
b57nd60x.sys
b57nd60a.sys N/A
Hardware Requirements