NIC Teaming, also known as load balancing and failover (LBFO), allows multiple network adapters on a computer to be placed into a team for bandwidth aggregation and network traffic failover in order to prevent connectivity loss in the event of a network component failure.
This article will guide you through the steps to create a NIC-Teaming in Hyper-v on Windows Server 2016. As an example, we’ll create a virtual switch and later we will add this vSwitch to VM while enabling NIC teaming for new switch.
To begin with the configuration, Open up Hyper-V consolethen click Virtual Switch Manager asshown in image below.
In the Create Virtual Switch, you have three option to select any of them
External: Provides virtual machines access to a physical network to communicate with servers and clients on an external network establishing communication connections between Hyper-V VM’s on the same Hyper-V server
Internal: Provides communication between virtual machines on the same Hyper-V server, and between the virtual machines and the management host operating system.
Private: Only allows communication between virtual machines on the same Hyper-V server.
Choose appropriate Switch type and click Create Virtual Switch
Choose appropriate network adapter, click Apply and OK
Since we have added network adapter to Hyper-V switch, let’s add it to VM
Right-click on VM > Settings
Click Add Hardware > Network > Adapter > Add
Here you need to specify Virtual Switch> Apply > Ok
Go to Adapter > Advanced Features, tick Enable this network adapter to be part of a team in the guest operating system
Now open up PowerShell to create new virtual switch by executing the following commands:
New-VMSwitch -Name External -NetAdapterName 'ethernet'
Adding New Network Adapter to VM:
get-vm -VMName dc | Add-VMNetworkAdapter -SwitchName 'external'
Enabling NIC teaming for VM:
Set-VMNetworkAdapter -VMName dc -AllowTeaming on
New-VMSwitch -Name External -NetAdapterName 'ethernet'
Adding New Network Adapter to VM:
get-vm -VMName dc | Add-VMNetworkAdapter -SwitchName 'external'
Enabling NIC teaming for VM:
Set-VMNetworkAdapter -VMName dc -AllowTeaming on
Done. I hope this article will be helpful to perform similar tasks in your environment.