In a nutshell, Windows Server NIC teaming provides hardware-independent bandwidth aggregation and transparent failover suitable both for physical and virtualized servers.
The same workflow density pushes for increased bandwidth too. This is why we got NIC teaming: to safeguard against a range of failures from plain accidental network cable disconnection to NIC or switch failures. But long story short, this feature gained special importance because of the arrival of virtualization and high-density workloads: knowing how many services can be run inside of multiple VMs hosted by a Hyper-V host, you just cannot afford connectivity loss, which impacts all of them. First-hand explanations from pros of this feature by Don Stanwyck, who was the program manager of the NIC teaming feature back then, can be found here. Link Teaming was first introduced as OOB feature in Windows Server 2012 with the intent to add simple affordable traffic reliability and load balancing for server workloads. The NIC teaming feature reached its maturity in Server 2012 R2, and there have been (almost) no major changes in this department in Server 2016, yet if you are just starting out with a practical use of NIC teaming on prepping for any related Microsoft exam you may find it useful to review this feature thoroughly. NIC teaming is not something we got with Windows Server 2016, but I just find it interesting to review this functionality as we have it in the current iteration of Windows Server, as usual, touching a bit on the basics and history of this feature.
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