topic about LIF failover policy in ONTAP Discussions

about LIF failover policy

johnwangjun — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:12:33 GMT

nextavail (default): Enables a LIF to fail over to the next available port.

nextavail what specific meaning, Dataontap according to what rules to choose nextavail port

Re: about LIF failover policy

bbjholcomb — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 20:45:12 GMT

I wouldn't use nextavail, our 10G were failing over to 1G connection that was not in use or setup. You should setup failover groups to avoid this problem.

Re: about LIF failover policy

scottgelb — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 20:51:13 GMT

Great point…and also with VLANs to make sure the lif only moves to ports capable to serve data on that VLAN.

Re: about LIF failover policy

EVILUTION — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 20:47:33 GMT

So this is pretty much the exact problem I have. My 10G connections fail between one another but if I take them both out they fail over to next available 1G port that isn't really usable.

I can't find any information on how to set up the failover group to point at the remote cluster 10G ports. Can one of you point me to an instruction?

Re: about LIF failover policy

douglasm — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 21:01:52 GMT

You need to setup failover-groups and specify the ports that you want to be part of the failover group

failover-groups create -failover-group nas_network -node node-01 -port e0a

failover-groups create -failover-group nas_network -node node-02 -port e0a

Then you need to modify the LIFs to use that failover-group.

net int modify -vserver vs_nfs -lif nas_lif1 -failover-group nas_network -use-failover-group enabled

You can verify that the LIFs will reach their proper failover target by reviewing

net int show -failover

Doug Moore

Professional Services Consultant - CMET

Re: about LIF failover policy

EVILUTION — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 19:20:08 GMT

Thanks a million for the reply. I'm still a bit cloudy on what goes where

I have two 10G dual port cards in each of my 6210 nodes. I am using one port on each card E3A and E5A to create LIF A0B.

I want Node1 A0B fail over to Node2 A0B only. What ports do I add to the failover group I create? A0B only, everything, or only the E3A and E5A ports?

network int failover-groups create -failover-group 10G_failover -node NODE1 -port A0B

network int failover-groups create -failover-group 10G_failover -node NODE2 -port A0B

network int failover-groups create -failover-group 10G_failover -node NODE1 -port E3A

network int failover-groups create -failover-group 10G_failover -node NODE2 -port E3A

network int failover-groups create -failover-group 10G_failover -node NODE1 -port E5A

network int failover-groups create -failover-group 10G_failover -node NODE2 -port E5A

Re: about LIF failover policy

scottgelb — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 19:23:54 GMT

When part of an Ifgrp the individual ports won't be used. So only the ifgrp is needed in this case.

Sent from my iPhone 5

Re: about LIF failover policy

EVILUTION — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 19:30:33 GMT

I ran the above and then ran the command below:

network interface modify -vserver VSERVER01 -lif VSERVER01-C-01 -use-failover-group enabled -failover-group 10G_failover

Now I see all of the above ports listed in the failover group. I just wonder if I added too many.

Re: about LIF failover policy

douglasm — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 19:34:21 GMT

run the command,

net int show -failover

this will show the failover targets for your LIFs.

Since your ifgrps are made up e3a and e5a, like scott said, you do not want to also include them in the failover group.

You can see all of the ports in the failover-group with this command

failover-group show

if you have e5a and e3a in the 10G_failover failover group, you need to remove them.

Doug Moore

Professional Services Consultant - CMET

Re: about LIF failover policy

EVILUTION — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 16:53:17 GMT

Thanks everyone... I believe it is now configured correctly.

One last question... what kind of monitoring do you have in place to detect when a network port or card fails?

Re: about LIF failover policy

markymarcc — Thu, 14 May 2015 09:59:12 GMT

I have a questiion on next available failover polocy

In my example below the order in the failover group is exactly the same, does that same the next avail is same for each and all would fail to the same one vs selecting a ramdom one in the list so failover is stagered ??

t500_0_fls3
t500_0_fls3_lif1 flc1-02-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a2a-500 nextavail fg-500
Failover Targets: flc1-02-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a2a-500,
flc1-04-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a4a-500,
flc1-01-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a1a-500,
flc1-03-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a3a-500
t500_0_fls4
t500_0_fls4_lif1 flc1-04-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a4a-500 nextavail fg-500
Failover Targets: flc1-04-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a4a-500,
flc1-01-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a1a-500,
flc1-02-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a2a-500,
flc1-03-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a3a-500
t505_1_fls99
t505_1_fls99_lif1 flc1-01-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a1a-505 nextavail fg-505
Failover Targets: flc1-01-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a1a-505,
flc1-04-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a4a-505,
flc1-02-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a2a-505,
flc1-03-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a3a-505
t508_2_fls99
t508_2_fls99_lif1 flc1-03-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a3a-508 nextavail fg-508
Failover Targets: flc1-03-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a3a-508,
flc1-04-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a4a-508,
flc1-01-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a1a-508,
flc1-02-sys-dev1-cloudsys:a2a-508