Setting up NIC Teaming

Teaming your network cards basically means installing two NICs onto the same server, plugging them both into the same network, and joining them together in a team. This gives you NIC redundancy in case of a failure, and redundancy is always a great thing! Sounds simple, right? Well, with Windows Server 2019, it actually is. This seemingly easy task has been challenging to put into practice with previous versions of the operating system, but with 2019, we can do this properly from a single interface and actually count on it to work as we expect it to.

Getting ready

We are going to set up a NIC team on a Windows Server 2019 machine. There are two NICs installed on this server, neither of which have yet been configured.

How to do it…

With the following steps, we can start teaming up:

1. Open Server Manager and from the left-hand pane, go ahead and click on Local Server.
2. Near the middle of the screen, you will see a section marked NIC Teaming. Go ahead and click on the word Disabled in order to launch the NIC Teaming screen, as follows:
   

   Figure 3.16 – Server Manager showing the NIC Teaming option

3. Down in the TEAMS section, drop down the TASKS menu and click on New Team:
   

   Figure 3.17 – The New Team option in the NIC Teaming window

4. Define a name for your new team and choose the two NICs that you want to be a part of it:
   

   Figure 3.18 – Adding two new NICs to a NIC team

5. That's it! NIC1 and NIC2 are now successfully joined together in a team and will work in tandem to make sure you are still connected in the event of a failure.
6. If you make your way to the regular Network Connections screen, where you define IP address information, you will see that you now have a new item listed beneath your physical network cards. This new item is the place where you will go to define the IP address information that you want the server to use:

Figure 3.19 – Showing the newly created NIC team in the Network Connections panel

Tip

You can create more than one team on a server! When setting up a multi-homed server with two network connections, you could easily make use of four NICs and create two teams, each containing two physical network cards.

How it works…

Creating NIC teams is a pretty easy process that you should practice as time permits. This option for redundancy has never been very popular, partly because it used to require the input of the network administrators to configure switch settings as well. Now that we have Windows Server 2019 available to us, and the process to configure it is so straightforward, I fully expect that NIC Teaming will become a standard procedure for administrators as they build every new server.