Problem adding NIC to Broadcom Team after installation of Symantec Endpoint Protection

We had a Dell Server with a Broadcom team of NIC’s running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2.  The motherboard died and was replaced with a new one and got new NIC’s that we needed to add to the team.  Every time we tried to add the NIC to the existing team we got the following error message:

[0006] Broadcom BCM5708C NetXtreme II GigE (NDIS VBD Client)
#2 does not support teaming.
Please select an adapter with NDIS 6 driver.

In looking at the Device Manager go to the View menu and choose “Show Hidden Devices” and you’ll see two entries for each of the network adapters:

Broadcom BCM5708C NetXtreme II GigE (NDIS VBD Client) #5
Broadcom BCM5708C NetXtreme II GigE (NDIS VBD Client) #5 Teefer2 Miniport

The second Teefer2 Miniport driver is added when Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) is installed on the server.  This driver is used for the firewall features in Symantec Endpoint Protection.

In order to get the teaming working again, we uninstalled Symantec Endpoint Protection, then setup the team, then rebooted the server and reinstalled Symantec Endpoint Protection.

9 thoughts on “Problem adding NIC to Broadcom Team after installation of Symantec Endpoint Protection”

  1. I just confirmed this. Something broke the team (could have been Symantec, or a Windows Update, or maybe I never configured it properly in the first place). I couldn’t re-create the team in BASC – I was getting an error “[0006] Broadcom BCM5708C NetXtreme II GigE (NDIS VBD Clinet)does not support teaming. Please select an adapter with NDIS 6 driver.”

    At first I tried updating the Broadcom drivers and Reinstalling BASC, but that didn’t help. After reading this, I uninstalled the Symantec Endpoint Client and created another install seed without the Firewall protection. It still recreated the Tefer2 Miniport drivers, but the Team still works. I have since added the Firewall protection back in too – no problems so far.

  2. Thank you for posting this! We had the exact same problem, and your procedure (uninstalling Symantec, set up the team, then reinstall Symantec solved the problem!

  3. Hi All,

    I also faced this problem and the solution was to same as u guys.

    But what if there is a need to create another teaming? we cant just uninstall SEP again just to create a new team in the future…

  4. Awesome! I had the same problem and this fixed it right away. I was about to start trying different drivers, which likely would have been a huge waste of time and effort… Thank you!

  5. Luckily I’ve never had to create another team after having this problem. My best guess is that you’d have to go through the same process again to uninstall SEP, create both the teams and then reinstall SEP. Definitely not something that you want to have to do very often.

  6. I found it possible to create the team without uninstalling SEP. Merely disable each of the Teefer2 Miniports added by SEP, created the team and enabled the Teefer2 Miniport devices again.

    The only drawback was that I lost remote connectivity to the server after the last Teefer2 Miniport was disabled. No biggy as I could use the DRAC port to continue.

  7. Although this wasn’t my exact problem, it helped identify it. After doing the “Show hidden Devices”, I had a virtual LAN adapter tied to every NIC port. This was because of the Windows Virtual Server 2005 SP1 required for granular restores of virtual computers with Backup Exec 2010 R3 SP3 in a Windows 2008 Server.

    After removing the component and restarted, the driver was identified as NDIS 6.1 as it should and was able to create the team.

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