NIC Teaming for Fault Tolerance and Load Balancing on Windows Server 2012

hello again as you know I am Eli the computer guy and today's class is NIC teaming for network fault tolerance and load balancing on Windows Server 2012 so as we have been talking about and almost all that the computer and networking classes I've been doing for a while now the modern world of computer technology is always on it's about computers and systems always being on and if they need to be turned off and repaired that we as the technicians can do it in our own sweet time so it used to be you would have server setup there would be a problem it would be an emergency we would have to run in immediately to make a repair and basically all the client computers will be down and it would be a complete mess oh it was horrible nowadays and computers and networking it's all about fault tolerance it's all about our systems being able to continuously run even when there are issues so that we can deal with the issues in an orderly manner so NIC teaming is it what does this for Windows Server 2012 NIC teaming allows us to combine multiple separate network cards into a single single seeming interface for fault tolerance and load balancing so basically like I showed you before with storage spaces where you could combine multiple hard drives into a single hard drive with this we are combining multiple network cards into a single network card this does many many many things for us the first thing that it does for us that should be pretty self-evident is it allows us to have fault tolerance so if we have let's say for network cards combined team into a single network card if a single individual network card and that team fails the other three will continue working and there's a good chance that that you won't even notice any problems you'll see something blip on up on the Event Viewer and then you'll tell your boss hey Friday night we should take this server down and replace the network card because one of the individual network cards within the team fail but now we can do it in our own sweet time but what's really cool is beyond beyond the the fault tolerance simply for the network cards we can now have fault tolerance for the network with these teamed necks so we can buy in multiple network interface cards into a team we can actually have those individual physical network interface cards connect to different switches within the same LAN so if we want fault tolerance for the switch level let's say a switch fails right now if all four of the network cards were connected to the same switch and a switch failed even a Cisco switch yes truly Cisco switches fail every once in a while then that server is still completely knocked off the network now with larger more complicated networks we're obviously going to have multiple different switches so with NIC teaming what we can do is we can actually connect the individual network cards to separate switches so that if a single switch fails they're still connected to the local area network now when you are doing this when you're connecting the team NICs to different switches you do have to make sure they're still on the same LAN the same local area network the reason is is because that that team that NIC team will have a single IP address so if you put put individual network adapters on two different IP address subnets you're going to have all kinds of problems so that is the really cool thing with NIC teaming so now what you can do is you can actually have fault tolerance at the switch level then beyond that since you have multiple network interface cards within a team you can now have load balancing so one of the issues that we are running into nowadays is that most of the the Swick equipment that we have in our network card closets are the old 10100 switches so 100 megabit per second switches they're good enough they're good enough for the c-level executives right when the c-level executive is sitting there and then he's trying to figure out what's the next thing they're going to buy for the company what's the next upgrade for the overall company swapping out the 10 100 Cisco switches is probably not high-end list for gigabit switches it would be nice but frankly um you know there's other things that the money can be spent on so the problem is and a lot of these networks especially with servers in your internal network is you're running into a bottleneck on that internal network because the server is connected with 100 megabit per second connection you have a hundred client computers connecting to that one server all trying to pull a lot of data and the bottleneck now is that hungar megabit per second connection well the thing is with a switch there's something called a backplane so the backplane is the overall amount of data that that switch can handle which is going to be huge it's just gonna be huge it's a hell of a lot more than hundred megabits per second because all the data that switch can handle well now imagine for load balancing purposes if you could connect for network interface cards from your server to the switch and now all four of those those ports can now be running a hundred megabits per second so the server can now load balanced over multiple ports so that it doesn't there's not that one a bottleneck on a single port so you can have a your server setting in you in your network closet or your server room you could add in four or eight network interface cards to it connect that to the switch and now instead of having 100 megabit per second maximum bandwidth you may have 800 megabit per second maximum bandwidth all using your same equipment you don't swap out the switch you don't swap out the server literally you spend I don't know $300 on network interface cards for your server and now it's running at the equivalent of a gig per second versus you know having to swap a server we're happy to swap your Cisco switch so on and so forth would be a complete nightmare now now looking at this now if you're going to be doing the NIC teaming in an enterprise environment do make sure you go and you study on this material it's pretty simple like if you want to set this up today in your home it's very good and as soon as you do it you'll notice performance boost if you want to go I'd do this in a small business office like ten person office fifty person office you'll you'll notice good things if you're going to go out and do this in an enterprise world I will say make sure go and study uh make sure you know what's going on with this because with this NIC teaming you can do a lot of advanced things where you actually match configuration with the switches and all that stuff and so in the enterprise environment you may run into to some bigger stuff now with the load balancing as far as I've been able to grasp with all this the one thing you do have to remember with a load balancing is it low balances going out so it's not load balancing coming in so if a lot of computers are trying to send data to a server it will still only actually go to one network interface card if a lot of computers are trying to ask for information from a server then it will be able load balance over any of the network interface cards that were in the team the other thing to remember about with the load balancing is this is not a packet level load balancing it's a file level load balancing so what I mean by a packet level load balancing is packet level load balancing means a packet goes out on this card this card this card this card this card this card this card so you're trying to move a file the packets for moving that file can go out on any of those interface card that's a packet level load balancing this is not packet level load balancing this file level so basically the first file goes out on interface card one and then if somebody needs another file the second file goes out an interface card two three four five six so on and so forth so let's go over to my little white board just so I can explain this a little bit more and so I make sure you guys really know what's going on here so basically you've got your server now this is a file server this is a web server something like that would really really really be good on something like a file server especially in an enterprise environment and you've now added your multiple network interface cards so this may be like some of the servers now actually have three or four network interface cards built into the motherboard you can add individual network interface cards into the PCI slots you can actually even by network interface cards that have four ports built into them so that's where I'm saying you could have two of those cards in one server and that would add new port to eight new ports for you so basically the normal setup would you would just have this switch here and then you would connect all the all the ports to the switch now with this that means you have fault-tolerance on a per port level so if a single port fails on either the switch or the computer you won't have any problems and you'll be able to have the load balancing so if somebody asks for a big file that will go out port one somebody asks for a different file that will go out port 2 part 3 port 4 so that's the basic idea that's that's going on with the fault tolerance and low balancing now the one thing like I say is with a switches which is really cool is what you can have you can have multiple ports on your server and then you can have that server actually connected to multiple switches so again if you have a large network you may have something like three switches connect it to a single router well you can run a cable to one switch to switch to three switch and then what's cool here with this level of fault tolerance is if a switch fails all the information would just get routed to the other switch maybe a little slower or whatever but it will get to the recipients that it needs to get to so this is one of the really really cool things with this level of fault tolerance and one of the reasons that I think Nick teimi is just absolutely cool now that is awesome so let's go over to to the actual computer to the actual server so I can show you how this works now again so that you guys can visualize what's going on what I'm showing you we are going to my lab virtual computer so I have a Windows date with VirtualBox installed on it and then I have all the virtual servers that I use in my little Network environments what I've done is I've added an additional number of network cards to the file server that we've been working with so it seems to that file server as it has multiple network cards and then we are going to go into that file server and play with all the configurations so basically let's just go over the server now so I can show you how all this stuff works so this is really really really cool so we're going to be dealing with a file server so we've been dealing with the file server for a while and just to show you we go to settings and then we go down to network and this is where I have enabled a number of other network adapters so it seems as if there's multiple network cards on the server so I enable the network adapter and it's on internal network internet then I did adapter to internal network and adapter 3 internal network so right now just to make my life easier I'm keeping this all on the internal network again for you all you have to remember is they all have to be on the same darn network again they all have to be on the same LAN so if you're doing this in a virtualized environment make sure they're all on the same internal network if you're if you're actually connecting this out to the real world make sure that they're all on the same either NAT or prettied adapter or whatever else so make sure these adapters are on the same network when you do this if you're doing this in a virtual world I would say just leave it on the internal network now we're going to do is we're going to bring up the file server now the first thing that I want to show you when I bring up the file servers I have network connections already open and from here we can see the three network cards that are on this virtual computer so one two and three now what I do want to do is I want to go down to command prompt and also show you the way I do IP config just a standard command that we've got multiple network cards showing up with multiple IP addresses so Ethernet 3 has an IP address Ethernet 2 as an IP address and so on and so forth so they're all three different IP addresses this is going to change um once once we actually connect the do the NIC teaming so what we're going to do in order to do the nicotine is we're going to go to server manager so this is the same server manager we've been looking at for many of these classes and then what we are going to do is we are going to go to local server so we click on local server and we click on local server this is where it gives us properties for this particular server so properties for file and it gives us a whole bunch of different stuff computer name domain blah blah blah blah blah blah blah what we are looking for is nic teaming now i don't know why they buried this here it seems like an odd place to bury this but it's Microsoft this is where they buried it so what we're going to do to configure NIC teaming is we are going to go here and by default it is disabled so it's got say NIC teaming disabled and then it's going to show us the ft the network cards under it so what we're going to do is we're going to click on the disabled and that is going to bring up the NIC teaming a configuration panel so here is the default and we can see just the servers online we can see that there's no teams and we can see our network interface cards so what we can do is we can click on tasks for teams so T what teams is what we are creating NIC teams so we create tasks we need to do a new team and then from here a team Nick so basically we have to name it just like with a lot of the server stuff nowadays you have got to name it for some reason and then what you're going to do is you are going to add adapters to the team so we're going to do 1 2 & 3 we can then go down and we can look at the additional properties we can see that their switch and dependent for now leave these as default again this is where I'm saying if you are in the enterprise world the real enterprise world thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of users after this class go out and get the book and really dig deep into this but most of you guys leaving this on the default will be fine for you guys that need more you've got to go out and really study it to make sure you know what you're talking about but basically we're going to say that you leave this a switch independent load balancing mode now the only thing here for you guys to understand for our level of classes is the address hash this is what you should normally leave it as default if you are going to be doing hyper-v though so we can do hyper-v is the virtualization server for Windows Server 2012 so if you were going to be using hyper-v this would be the one thing where you go down and you switch it to the hyper-v port but we will just leave it as address hash and then we can have standby adapters I don't know Windows Server seems very like they like hot swappable or hot spares as they're called where basically you have a device that you're not actually using but you can basically turn it on if there are problems think of this as the hot spare for for the the the the network card for some reason and then we have down here so I would say I would not mess with this I would leave it as it is and then the primary team NIC interface with this you can go on and from VLAN membership again for most of you guys don't worry about this if you have a more complicated network though you can specify which VLAN this is supposed to be on but again for you guys I would not mess with it then all you're going to do is do okay and it's going to create that team so now it's created the team and if we open it up we can see it's now activated so it may take a minute so if everything is ok switch independent address hash blah blah blah so there's not a lot to see with this so now they're all combined into one NIC as far as the server is concerned we can see that by if we go now and we go to the command prompt and I type in ipconfig again we can see that we now get one IP address remember we did have three different NICs with three different IP addresses now we only get one so it's as far as a server is concerned that is now one network interface card now what we can do is we if we go back to network connections we can see that we still see those intimate you'll network interface cards we don't want to mess with those what we can do is this team Nick so this is that that team that we created we can right-click on it we can go to properties and we can now interact with that team as if is an individual network interface card so we can go to tcp/ip version four properties and we can go in here and this here is where we would configure things such as the static IP address again Microsoft is really weird with a server 2012 interface where you do some things in the new configuration panel and some things in the old configuration panel so so when I showed you storage spaces when you wanted to extend a virtual drive you would do that within storage spaces and if you wanted to shrink a virtual drive you had to go back and do it in Disk Management this is kind of the same way in order to create the teams you would do that within the NIC teaming panel if you want to do things like the IP address and all this other advanced stuff that you may want to do um you go back here and actually do that at the network connections so from here there's really a lot not a lot to this like if you added new network cards to your server you could do add to team so let's say you started out with a server with two network cards and then you realize oh my golly this is really really really cool you could turn off the server you can add additional network interface cards and then you can come here to adapters and interfaces and then you could select those new interface cards and add them to the team or you could remove them from the team or you could disable or you could go to properties again here with a team itself you could delete the team if you want to get rid of the team or we can go to properties and look at all this information and muck around with it so that's really I mean NIC teaming is one of those things that's really really really flippin awesome um but really there's not a whole lot to it so we use this NIC teaming for but the big thing is for fault tolerance with these big servers just like we have raid for the hard or just like we have redundant power supplies we can basically now have redundant NIC hearts because network interface cards do die every one so it's again it's not in all my years all my years I'm not saying I've seen a whole hell of a lot of network interface cards die but when you're in the enterprise world do you want to risk it so we give fault-tolerance to the network interface cards then we give the load-balancing to the network interface cards so that basically again when it's sending out data it can send out one file through port one one file through port two one five through port three one pile file through through port four so basically you can get almost to a gigabit per second performance on some old server running into some old cisco networks which that server now is running as if it's like a modern server with it with the with the equipment and for for $300 worth of network interface cards so that's a very useful thing and then finally the fault tolerance across multiple switches really you just can't beat that that's really awesome so as long as they're on the same local area network you can have the different network interface cards connected to different switches if an entire switch fails again your server stays up and running and you can fix the problem in your own leisurely way again this is one of the reasons why I think Server 2012 is just absolutely awesome and when you guys talk about well isn't Linux free and why do I want to pay 600 bucks and who wants to pay for a $50 client access license I laugh because you start adding up all this functionality that is that easy and it's really nice again I showed you NIC teaming and there's really not much more to it again if you're really in the real enterprise world you've got 10,000 users then sit sit down with the real book and sit down with your Cisco books and make sure you know exactly what you're doing but first of all like if this is a home office you're dealing with or a small business environment 50 to even 100 users you could set this up tomorrow and I guarantee you you would see a performance increase it would be really really nice especially on something like a file sir be absolutely amazing so as you know I am Eli the computer guy today's class was NIC teaming for network fault tolerance and load balancing on Windows Server 2012 again absolutely awesome piece of functionality so go take a look at it because it's really really cool as always I enjoy teaching this class and look forward to you the next one

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 122,729

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Id: TGNoT4wkgXA

Length: 22min 38sec (1358 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 04 2013