Cisco Catalyst 2960S Switch
Intel Dual Port NIC (teamed)
BroadComm Quad Port NIC (teamed 2 ports)
We hired a contractor to setup a fairly simple SQL cluster and SAN storage. With the above switch and NICs, they have teamed two cards on each server (3 servers total) for the domain network communication. There is no problem with the NIC teams, they are functioning fine, I have tested failover of each (unplug one of the cords).
The question I have is, would I gain any benefit from also creating an EtherChannel in my switch for each of these NIC teams? The contractor has not done this, and although everything is working fine, I want to get the top performance and reliability of this buildout.
More likely than not the teams are using LACP for increased throughput and failover. If this is the case manually creating an EtherChannel is redundant and will lock the port group into specific manually configured ports (rather than LACP's dynamic assignment of ports).
Basically it sounds like the configuration is 100% correct and you shouldn't mess with it. You should probably verify that the NIC teams are configured for LACP (if they're not it may be for good reason, don't change it if you don't understand the reasons it was setup the way it is).
Side note: As long as you're poking around, the Broadcom NIC is probably a 57xx Series, if it's firmware/driver/management software isn't from 2011, it's got some serious bugs that updates will fix.
Well yes, setting up two NICs in a team only gives you failover redundancy, if it's done using an LACP-capable stack then etherchanneling on the switch allows you to, theoretically at least, double your bandwidth.
Is the link currently saturated? If not, then configuring Etherchannel is not likely to do anything for you.
Link aggregation != better network performance (throughput) if the current link isn't saturated.