The primary purpose of the NIC teaming functionality is that when a teamed NIC is employed, the standard MIB-II tables only represent the logical (teamed) NIC. This inherently inhibits the creation of L2 connectivity between the Host, with the teamed NICs, and the adjacent switch or switches. The reason is that the same logical MAC is observed on multiple access ports. The NIC teaming functionality pulls the physical NIC information (including the BIM - Burned-in MAC) from the Enterprise MIBs and creates a NetworkAdapterRedundancyGroup to represent the logical grouping of the physical NICs. This allows L2 Cable connections to form normally with adjacent Switches.

Note:

NIC teaming is possible for a number of different media types. However, the primary focus is on attempting to solve the issue for Ethernet-media devices.

NIC teaming support is applicable specifically to device specific discovery. NIC teaming support occurs at three different points in IP Availability Manager which are as follows:

  • IP Availability Manager initialization — This involves loading of the various meta-data to provide network access redundancy and allow rapid convergence when a failure occurs.

  • oid2Type configuration — This involves defining the specific probes to be launched for the vendors that are supported.

  • Discovery probes — This involves additional data collection handled through the normal additional discovery probes.

    Upon discovery of the device (host) that is configured for NIC teaming, a redundancy group namely, NetworkAdapterRedundancyGroup is created in the IP Availability Manager. A NetworkAdapterRedundancyGroup consists of two or more port or interface objects that participate in a redundant configuration (NIC teaming). The NARG (NetworkAdapterRedundancyGroup) can indeed consist of Ports or Interfaces, but the members of the teamed NIC will always be created as Interfaces:

    Relationship: The NetworkAdapterRedundancyGroup has a ComposedOf relationship with Interfaces and Interfaces have a PartOf relationship with NetworkAdapterRedundancyGroup.