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Difficulty: Very hardResilience, High Availability, and Redundancy

An infrastructure engineer is designing network-level resiliency for a critical telemetry gateway cluster operating within an industrial plant. The business continuity requirement specifies that the server nodes must maintain active network connection redundancy across two physically separate upstream access switches. Crucially, the network management team cannot make any configuration changes or protocol modifications (such as enabling port channels or link aggregation) on the existing switches. Which of the following networking configurations should the engineer implement to satisfy these requirements?

  1. Switch-independent active-backup NIC teaming with transmit load balancingAnswer
  2. B
    Active-active link aggregation using IEEE 802.3ad LACP protocol
  3. C
    Dual Host Bus Adapter multipathing configured over a RAID 10 storage array
  4. D
    Asynchronous SAN block replication directed to a secondary warm recovery site

Answer

Switch-independent active-backup NIC teaming with transmit load balancing provides host-level network path redundancy without requiring switch configuration changes.
The correct choice utilizes switch-independent active-backup NIC teaming. This architecture allows the host operating system to handle adapter failover independently using MAC management or probing, satisfying both the dual-switch redundancy requirement and the strict operational constraint preventing switch-side configuration changes.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the primary constraint and objective in the scenario.
Objective is network link redundancy across dual switches; constraint is zero configuration changes on the access switches.
Any protocol requiring switch-side setup (like LACP or etherchannel) is immediately eliminated.
2
Distinguish host-managed NIC redundancy from switch-managed link aggregation.
Switch-independent NIC teaming allows the host hypervisor to manage link status via probing/beaconing without switch assistance.
The operating system controls which network interface card transmits frames, falling back seamlessly if a link fails.
3
Differentiate network interface high availability from storage fault tolerance and disaster recovery.
Multipath storage/RAID addresses block data access, while SAN replication addresses disaster recovery.
Only NIC teaming directly resolves host-to-switch network communication resilience.

Key Concept

Switch-Independent NIC Teaming for Host Network Resilience
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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Topics

Resilience, High Availability, and Redundancy

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