Intel and Broadcom Windows Teaming Equivalents to Linux Active-Backup Bonding

I am planning on teaming the NICs on all my servers so each NIC is connected to a different switch. These switches will then be trunked. I don't care about more throughput, this is just failover, and don't want to have worry about stacking the switches. For this reason, on the Linux servers I have chosen Active-Backup Mode, using Primary so one of the nicks will always be the preferred one:

active-backup This is generally the preferred mode, particularly if the switches have an ISL and play together well. If the network configuration is such that one switch is specifically a backup switch (e.g., has lower capacity, higher cost, etc), then the primary option can be used to insure that the preferred link is always used when it is available.

Can anyone tell me what the equivalent mode would be for both Intel and Broadcom cards on Windows Server 2003?

Solution 1:

There are no bonding modes in Windows teaming. There's only active/active (mode-4 in Linux terms, requires a switch that supports it) and active/passive (or failover) mode.

Also, if you're mixing b-coms and intels in the same machine, you cannot use both Intel ProSet and BACS to manage the teams. You have to use only one of them, and each team must have at least one NIC corresponding to the team management brand used.

That means that if you have b-coms and intels, and you want to use BACS for teaming, you need to create teams, each with at least one b-com (since it corresponds to BACS natively). You can't, under BACS, create teams with intels only.