Important information about using teamed NICs and Storage Foundation with High Availability for Windows (SFW-HA).

NIC teaming, also known as NIC Bonding, Ethernet bonding, Trunking, etc., is the term that describes the use of multiple NICs in parallel to increase the link speed beyond the limits of any one single NIC and to increase the redundancy for high availability. When using NIC Teaming, a virtual NIC is created and network requests are made to the virtual NIC, and the NIC Teaming software handles which physical NIC will handle the requests.

If NIC teaming is used for the SFW-HA heartbeat link, or is the NIC that is referenced by the SFW-HA NIC resource type, the virtual NIC should be configured with a unique MAC address that is different from the MAC addresses of any of the physical NICs that are in the NIC team. The MAC address needs to be unique because SFW-HA uses MAC addresses to differentiate between NICs, not the name of the NIC. If any additional options are used by the NIC teaming software that does not provide a unique MAC address for the virtual NIC, such as VLAN tagging options that are commercially available in various NIC teaming software applications, SFW-HA may not be able to assign an IP address correctly.

If the MAC address of the virtual NIC matches the MAC address of any of the physical NICs, the Veritas Low Latency Transport (LLT) protocol and any IP addresses that are assigned via the SFW-HA IP resource type will incorrectly bind to the physical NIC and not to the virtual NIC created by the NIC team. This will prevent both LLT and IP addresses from being able to fail over between the  NICs used in the NIC team when there is a NIC failure. Veritas recommends to thoroughly test networking for both the heartbeat network and the IP resource type, ensuring the IP address is bound to the NIC team and not a physical NIC, for proper functionality before using the configuration in a production environment.