Teaming your network cards basically means installing two NICs onto the same server, plugging them both into the same network, and joining them together in a "team". This gives you NIC redundancy in case of a failure, and redundancy is always a great thing! Sounds simple, right? Well, with Windows Server 2012 R2 it finally is. This seemingly easy task has always been challenging to put into practice with previous versions of the operating system, but with 2012 R2 we can finally do it properly from a single interface and actually count on it to work as we expect it to.
We are going to set up a NIC team on a Windows Server 2012 R2 machine. There are two NICs installed onto this server, neither of which have yet been configured.