Dell Emulex Family of Adapters - Manual (Page 747)

OneCommand NIC Teaming and VLAN Manager User Manual P009415-01A Rev. A
1. Overview
Terminology
747
Terminology

Team – A group of available adapters working together and presented as a
single adapter to applications.

VLAN – A Virtual LAN allows computers or virtual machines (hypervisor
guests) to act as if they are connected by a private, directly connected network.
You can assign VLANs to teams or individual adapters.

VLAN Bound adapter – A single adapter to which you assigned VLANs. This
adapter cannot be part of a team. These are also called VLAN adapters.

Available adapter – An adapter that is not a member of a team and has no
assigned VLANs. This adapter is also called a free or unbound adapter.

Reactivation delay – The amount of time that an adapter must be ready to carry
traffic before it is allowed to rejoin its team.
Failover (FO)
A failover team consists of at least two and at the most three members; a primary and
the remaining secondary members. When a team is created, the primary member is
active and the remaining secondary members are passive. When the primary team
member disconnects (due to link down, link disabled or any other reason) the failover
mechanism selects one of the secondary team members (which is in a link up state) at
random and traffic continues.
When a previously failed primary team member reports a link up state, failback to the
primary member occurs only if the team was created with auto failback enabled. For
teams created with auto failback disabled, traffic will continue on one of the secondary
adapters. By default all the failover team members use the same MAC address, the
MAC address of the primary team member.
Load Balancing
Smart Load Balancing
Team load balancing provides both load balancing and fault tolerance. Team load
balancing works with any Ethernet switch and does not require any switch
configuration. The team advertises multiple MAC addresses and one or more IP
addresses. The virtual team adapter selects the team MAC address from the list of load
balancing members. When the server receives an address resolution protocol (ARP)
request, the software-networking stack always sends an ARP reply with the team MAC
address. To begin the load balancing process, the intermediate teaming driver modifies
this ARP reply by changing the source MAC address to match one of the physical
adapters.
Load balancing enables both transmit and receive load balancing based on load
balancing function to maintain in-order delivery of frames.