Hello,

We want to implement NIC Teaming for an Exchange 2013 DAG cluster, but only on the MAPI network.  Does anyone know the settings for this with Windows 2012R2?  Specifically Teaming Mode and Load Balancing Mode?  I have seen a page that mentioned that it must be set up as Active/Passive, thus not in LACP mode which we normally would use with a LAG on our switches.

I have a 700 page Exchange 2013 book which mentions nothing about it and have scoured the web only to find that one page, so I was curious as to what people who are using it are doing and what Microsoft's recommendations are.

Thank you,

Kurt

Hi Kurt,

The recommendation is not to team the NICs. This way Exchange takes care of the hardware failure by mounting the databases onto the other servers, while you can fix the issue.

With teaming, you wont even know if a NIC has failed unless you have a good monitoring solution which monitors both hardware and software on it.

1. Why the need to team? I generally avoid it as it can complicate things. Microsoft generally recommends against teaming and if you do deploy it , use if for tolerance, not load balancing.

2. The recommendation now is not separate the MAPI and REPL networks. One network for both keeps it simple.

I would recommend that you stick to the preferred arch as much as possible.

Here is a link to the preferred architecture for 2013:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2014/04/21/the-preferred-architecture.aspx

Updates to that:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2015/06/19/ask-the-perf-guy-how-big-is-too-big.aspx

Thank you to you both, and for the links to the posts.  After reading them it looks like we will not do the teaming but we will still use different NICS for MAPI and replication as we do not have 10Gb NICS for that purpose.

Kurt

• Edited by k2009 16 hours 23 minutes ago