We were introduced to load balancing and failover with NIC teaming at the beginning of this chapter, in the Load balancing and failover (NIC teaming) section. This is an important feature, so let's take a look at it in detail in this section.
Various NIC manufacturers refer to the NIC teaming solution as Load Balancing and Failover (LBFO). These manufactures have been in the market for a long time, providing NIC teaming software for their NICs. Customers buying servers have to install this NIC teaming software after setting up an operating system to create a team consisting of multiple physical NICs. This functionality has been around in the industry for some time now, and most of our critical applications and database servers are configured for NIC teaming.
NIC manufacturers provided this great functionality of making the server network capable of load balancing and failover on multiple NICs available inside the server; but on the other...