NIC teaming was a long desired feature so far, which Microsoft neither provided built-in, nor supported when offered by hardware vendors. They finally introduced the long-awaited ability in Windows 2012, and it was received well by customers. From a solution perspective, you no longer need to depend on any hardware vendor's offering it, as MS provides this feature inherently. Also referred to as Load Balancing and Failover (LBFO), the feature is primarily used for Hyper-V hosts and Windows Servers, but can be used in virtual machines as well. As per the Microsoft directive, a maximum of 32 NICs can be used as NIC team members on a host, though only two for a virtual machine.
There are two evident use cases for employing NIC teaming: