Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet Teaming ServicesNetXtreme User Guide
Broadcom
®
April 2017 • 2CS57XX-CDUM514-R Page 109
SLB (Auto-Fallback Disable)
This type of team is identical to the Smart Load Balance and Failover type of team, with the following
exception—when the standby member is active, if a primary member comes back on line, the team continues
using the standby member rather than switching back to the primary member. This type of team is supported
only for situations in which the network cable is disconnected and reconnected to the network adapter. It is not
supported for situations in which the adapter is removed/installed through Device Manager or Hot-Plug PCI.
If any primary adapter assigned to a team is disabled, the team functions as a Smart Load Balancing and
Failover type of team in which auto-fallback occurs.
Software Components
Teaming is implemented via an NDIS intermediate driver in the Windows Operating System environment. This
software component works with the miniport driver, the NDIS layer, and the protocol stack to enable the teaming
architecture (see Figure 3). The miniport driver controls the host LAN controller directly to enable functions such
as sends, receives, and interrupt processing. The intermediate driver fits between the miniport driver and the
protocol layer multiplexing several miniport driver instances, and creating a virtual adapter that looks like a single
adapter to the NDIS layer. NDIS provides a set of library functions to enable the communications between either
miniport drivers or intermediate drivers and the protocol stack. A protocol address such as an IP address is
assigned to each miniport device instance, but when an Intermediate driver is installed, the protocol address is
assigned to the virtual team adapter and not to the individual miniport devices that make up the team.
The Broadcom supplied teaming support is provided by three individual software components that work together
and are supported as a package. When one component is upgraded, all the other components must be
upgraded to the supported versions. Table 10 describes the three software components and their associated
files for supported operating systems.
The Broadcom Advanced Control Suite (BACS) utility is designed to run in 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Server
operating system. BACS is used to configure load balancing and fault tolerance teaming, and VLANs. In
addition, it displays the MAC address, driver version, and status information about each network adapter. BACS
also includes a number of diagnostics tools such as hardware diagnostics, cable testing, and a network topology
test.
Table 10: Broadcom Teaming Software Component
Software Component Broadcom Name Windows Linux
Miniport Driver Broadcom Base Driver b57nd60X.sys tg3
Intermediate Driver Broadcom Advanced Server Program
(BASP)
Basp.sys bonding
Configuration User Interface Broadcom Advanced Control Suite
(BACS)
BACS BACS CLI
NDIS 6 Driver Windows Vista and later x86 driver
Windows Vista and later x64 driver
b57nd60x.sys
b57nd60a.sys
N/A
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