SOLVED: VIDEO: Broadcom NIC Teaming & Troubleshooting

Creating a network adapter team is generally an easy way to double triple or quadruple your throughput but there are a number of annoying roadblocks to get around with Broadcom NIC’s

Broadcom NIC Teaming Gotchas:

1. Install the latest Broadcom firmware and drivers
2. Unplug your network cables while creating the team
3. Make sure you created the same NIC link aggregation (aka. Team) on your switch BEFORE you create it on on your servers NIC’s
4. Download and install the latest Broadcom Advanced Control Suite
5. RIGHT CLICK on the Broadcom Advanced Control Suite and select RUN AS ADMINISTRATOR
6. If you still can’t get NIC Teaming (aka. NIC aggregation) done
   1. Uninstall the Broadcom Advanced Control Suite
   2. Using Hyper V Manager > SWITCH MANAGER > uninstall any NIC’s
   3. Using Device Manager uninstall all your NIC’s
   4. Reboot
   5. Go to step 1 above and start again

The most annoying gotcha is the RUN AS ADMINISTRATOR requirement.  If you don’t do that CREATE TEAM will not appear.

Below is a video demonstrating some of these Broadcom issues and solutions:

If you don’t understand why adding a NIC to a team does NOT increase performance, see this short explanation and video.