NIC teaming, also called bonding, balancing, and aggregation is a technology that has
been available for some time, but it was always tied to specific hardware implementations.
The NIC teaming capability in Windows Server 2012 R2 is hardware-independent and enables
you to combine multiple physical network adapters into a single interface. The results can
include an increased performance by combining the throughput of the adapters and protection
from adapter failures by dynamically moving all traffic to the functioning NICs.
NIC teaming in Windows Server 2012 R2 supports two modes:
- Switch Independent Mode All the network adapters are connected to different switches, providing alternative routes through the network.
- Switch Dependent Mode All the network adapters are connected to the same switch, providing a single interface with their combined bandwidth.
