Episode 132: Load Balancing, Multipathing, and NIC Teaming

High-availability and performance optimization often rely on distributing traffic across multiple paths or interfaces. This episode breaks down three related technologies: load balancing, multipathing, and NIC teaming. You’ll learn how load balancers distribute client traffic across servers, how multipathing ensures resilient access to storage, and how NIC teaming aggregates bandwidth or provides failover for network interfaces. Each of these technologies contributes to redundancy, uptime, and throughput improvements.

We explain different configurations—such as active-active vs. active-passive setups—and what role software, operating systems, and networking hardware play in each method. Whether you're building a fault-tolerant storage solution or ensuring a critical application stays responsive, this episode gives you the technical detail needed to choose the right strategy. You'll walk away with a firm understanding of how to scale and harden services using layered network interfaces.