Adapter teaming

In previous versions, many administrators chose to use teaming software provided by network adapter manufacturers. Individual roles would be placed on their own network teams. This presented three problems.

First, Microsoft does not directly support third-party teaming solutions; if a problem arose that appeared to be network-related, you would be asked to break any manufacturer teams for troubleshooting purposes. If breaking the team solved the problem, it was likely that you'd get no other answer, even if the actual problem was due to a misconfiguration and not any inherent flaw in teaming.

Second, a functional team could be inadvertently broken by a faulty driver upgrade. These problems don't always manifest in an easy-to-troubleshoot fashion, and other times they cause blue-screen loops that are difficult to correct.

The third problem is actually the worst of the three. Third-party teaming in Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 meant that a great many physical adapters were required...