I recently needed to look at HP’s NIC Teaming feature within their Proliant server product line to provide “ultra” high-availability to a new Windows 2008 Cluster which was running Microsoft Exchange 2007. It seems that NIC teaming has come a long ways from the original NIC fault tolerance where one NIC would simply act as a standby should the first loose LINK with the network switch.

HP’s NIC Teaming now supports 802.3ad (LACP) which provides a load balanced and fault tolerant solution. I’ve posted several documents to my website for anyone that might be looking for additional information.

Here is a very good document that outlines NIC teaming from head to toe, along with additional documents that outline the different capabilities and what operating systems are supported.

In short you need to setup an LACP group on the Nortel switch for any ports that you want to be in the LAG (Link Aggregation Group). You can leave the HP NIC teaming options set to Automatic and it should negotiate as a “802.3ad Dynamic with Fault Tolerance” when you have the Nortel switch configuration properly.

5520-48T-PWR> enable
5520-48T-PWR# config term
5520-48T-PWR(config)# interface FastEthernet 1/1-2
5520-48T-PWR(config-if)#lacp aggregation port 1/1-2 enable
5520-48T-PWR(config-if)#lacp mode port 1/1-2 active
5520-48T-PWR(config-if)#lacp key port 1/1-2 101

Cheers!