I’m used to working with medium-sized datacenters where walls are filled with server blades and SANs and stuff I do not understand. My new job – not so much. On my first visit to the “server room” I found a pair of HP ML 350 G3 (!) servers gathering dust in a corner.

In order to support a more advanced CI process and virtualize the few production systems we have, I invested in a HP DL 380G8 server and new switches all around. We’re now on gigabit links all the way out to each workstation, and floors are connected to each other with a 2Gb link. For switches, I bought 3 Netgear GSM7224V2 switches. For our use, these work wonders at a fraction of the price of Cisco units.

Using Windows Server 2012 on the new HP server, we’re using all 4 NICs on the server in a so-called “converged fabric”.

Anyway, what I was gonna tell you anyway in this post, is that Windows Server NIC teaming in LACP mode works nicely with Netgear LAGs (Link Aggregation Groups). Simply define a LAG on the NetGear switch and add the switchports connected to your converged fabric. On the Windows Server, define a NIC Team using LACP/Address Hash, and witness a nice increase in network speed:

BTW; Read this blog post for more details on nic teaming.