the advanced server features program is a kernel module designed for the linux 2.2 kernel that provides load balancing, failover, and vlan features. these features are provided by creating teams that consist of multiple nics. a team can consist of 1 to 8 nics and each nic can be designated primary or standby. all primary nic in a team will participate in load balancing operations by sending and receiving a portion of the total traffic. standby nics will take over in the event that all primary nics have lost their links. vlans can be added to a team to allow multiple vlans with different vlan ids and a virtual device is created for each vlan added.

    advanced server features program supports load balance and generic trunking. in load balance mode, all the nic drivers must support nic extension (nice). in this distribution, only 3com nics are supported. load balance mode works with all ethernet switches without configuring the switch ports to any special trunking mode. only ip traffic will be load balanced in both inbound and outbound directions. the generic trunking mode does not require nice and can work with any nic, however, it requires the ethernet switch to support link aggregation and be properly configured. this mode is protocol-independent and all traffic should be load balanced and fault tolerant.