Diagnostics And The At-Diag Utility; Load Balancing And Fail-Over Protection - Allied Telesis AT-2700FX Installation Manual

Diagnostics and
the AT-Diag
Utility
Load Balancing
and Fail-over
Protection
Included on the Allied Telesyn Installation CD is the AT-Diag utility. This
program is useful in testing and configuring a network adapter card.
Functions include:
Testing a network adapter card.
Performing a link test between an adapter port and a remote device,
such as an Ethernet switch or hub.
Setting the speed and duplex mode of an adapter port.
Enabling or disabling the BootPROM chip and MBA.
Specifying the default port for MBA.
Viewing hardware information.
For instructions, refer to Chapter 10, "AT-Diag Utility" on page 175.
Allied Telesyn offers two drivers for an adapter card installed in a Microsoft
Windows 2000, 2003, or XP system. There is a regular driver and an
enhanced driver with load balancing and fail-over (LBFO) protection.
These latter features are described in the following subsections.
Load Balancing
The load balancing feature of the LBFO driver is primarily intended for
adapters in network servers. It enhances network performance by
distributing the traffic over two adapters and also increases network
resiliency by providing a redundant link from the server to the network
should a link fail.
The LBFO driver allows you to increase the bandwidth from a network
server by configuring two network adapters to function as one virtual
adapter. The two adapters distribute traffic between themselves by taking
turns transmitting packets in a round-robin fashion. One adapter transmits
a packet, the next packet is transmitted by the other adapter, and so on.
Note the following before using the LBFO driver:
This driver is supported only on Microsoft Windows 2000, 2003, and
XP systems.
The driver is supported on the AT-2451FTX, AT-2701FX, AT-2701FTX,
and AT-2746FX Series cards. It is not supported on the older versions
of these adapters (for example, AT-2450FTX, AT-2700FX, etc.).
Note
The LBFO driver has not been certified by Microsoft Corporation.
Network Adapter Card Installation Guide
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