We are running an IBM Bladecenter here with 2 NICs per blade. The NICs are Broadcoms which come with the BAC Suite to allow you to configure Teaming for failover support. My question is during the Teaming configuration wizard I'm asked optionally to identity a standby member - is this necessary? With only 2 Nics in the blade and both assigned to the team won't they automatically fail over if one loses connection? Otherwise what's the point of the team?
SnapOverflow
The BACS suite has a few options to choose from. I recently set up some 2008 Domain Controllers that used two Broadcom 5708 nics in a team. We used the SLB Failover config, which basically states that when all "load-balancing" members of the team fail, to then switch over to the standby adapter. (You'll need to determine whether you want the standby adapter to continue to answer requests, or that it should failback over to the original nic when it comes back online, see the auto-failback option for more details). Therefore, when I configured them, I chose both adapters to be members of the team, and one of the nics to be the standby. I think by default it will try to load balance between the nics if you don't choose one of them to be a standby.
Here is the link I used, which gives instructions on a more recent version of bacs than the above posters link.
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/network/BroadCom/R125875/en/bacs.htm