Users Guide

Table Of Contents
12–Marvell Teaming Services
Executive Summary
Doc No. BC0054508-00 Rev. R
January 21, 2021 Page 153 Copyright © 2021 Marvell
The use of a repeater requires that each station participating within the collision
domain operate in half-duplex mode. Although half-duplex mode is supported for
Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) adapters in the IEEE 802.3 specification, half-duplex
mode is not supported by the majority of GbE adapter manufacturers. Therefore,
half-duplex mode is not considered here.
Teaming across hubs is supported for troubleshooting purposes (such as
connecting a network analyzer) for SLB teams only.
Switching Hub
Unlike a repeater hub, a switching hub (or more simply a switch) allows an
Ethernet network to be broken into multiple collision domains. The switch is
responsible for forwarding Ethernet packets between hosts based solely on
Ethernet MAC addresses. A physical network adapter that is attached to a switch
may operate in half-duplex or full-duplex mode.
To support Generic Trunking and 802.3ad Link Aggregation, a switch must
specifically support such functionality. If the switch does not support these
protocols, it may still be used for Smart Load Balancing.
Router
A router is designed to route network traffic based on Layer 3 or higher protocols,
although it often also works as a Layer 2 device with switching capabilities. The
teaming of ports connected directly to a router is not supported.
Teaming Support by Processor
All team types are supported by the IA-32 and EM64T processors.
Configuring Teaming
The QConvergeConsole (QCC) GUI and QLogic Control Suite (QCS) CLI utility
are used to configure teaming in the supported operating system environments.
These utilities run on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows family of operating systems. Use
these utilities to configure VLANs and load balancing and fault tolerance teaming.
In addition, they display the MAC address, driver version, and status information
for each network adapter. These utilities also include several diagnostics tools
such as hardware diagnostics, cable testing, and a network topology test.
All modes of network teaming are supported across switches when
operating as a stackable switch.