Hello, Does Microsoft support teaming for Domain controllers? ThanksTom

Teaming is not a Microsoft Windows function. I assume that you are referring to teaming provided by HP software/drivers. In any case, if you are familiar with teaming, the software will basically present the NICs that are teamed as one virtual NIC. Teaming provides different options for load balancing and failover. From my experience, I have not found much value in teaming DCs. The reason is that if you have multiple DCs and you loose network connectivity for one of them, you already have redundancy built into your design by having other DCs. While teaming works, you are adding extra complexity in your design and complexity always adds risk and reduces reliability. In addition, teaming requires additional NICs to be enabled, extra wiring, additional switch ports. For one DC, the cost is minimal, but it can add up if you have quite a bit of servers to team. Whether or not you decide to proceed with teaming should be based on a cost/benefit analysis. Guides and tutorials, visit ITGeared.com.

Hi Tom, Thanks for posting here. Yes, technically we can implement NIC failover by using NIC teaming but this technology is not officially supported by Microsoft on Windows Server 2008 R2 platform. Network adapter teaming and server clustering http://support.microsoft.com/kb/254101/ Microsoft Support Policy for NIC Teaming with Hyper-V http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968703 Regards, Tiger Li TechNet Subscriber Support in forum If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tnmff@microsoft.com.Tiger Li TechNet Community Support

Hi Tom, Thanks for posting here. Yes, technically we can implement NIC failover by using NIC teaming but this technology is not officially supported by Microsoft on Windows Server 2008 R2 platform. Network adapter teaming and server clustering http://support.microsoft.com/kb/254101/ Microsoft Support Policy for NIC Teaming with Hyper-V http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968703 Regards, Tiger Li TechNet Subscriber Support in forum If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tnmff@microsoft.com.Tiger Li TechNet Community Support

Thanks. So it appears though it is possible, stay away from it when it comes down to DC's? Right? I am doing teaming on 2008R2 for a lot of applications like sharepoint, scom, exchange, sql etc. but while configuring additional DC's I saw memory leak as well DNS seeing the active and standby NIC's as dynamically addressed. TIATom

Tom, As an additional note, I can tell you from my experience, that teaming can work well for specific scenarios, but in general, consider that complexity reduces reliability. What you sometimes encounter when adding additional complexity into the design is that the complexity itself introduces additional risk and failures. If you can create a highly available service by having more than one node, as in the case of AD, DNS, DHCP, then I wouldn't tend to include another component on top of that. You already have a highly reliable design without the added complexity.Guides and tutorials, visit ITGeared.com.