vifs, vlans and ports

[sninan]

This is more of a design question than anything.  I am deploying a 2040a with 4 ethernet ports on each controller.  I wanted to design the networking as such

vlan x - MGMT:  vif with ports e1, e2

vlan xx: iSCSI:  vif with ports e2, e3

I know this can be done, but what if I wanted to create a vlan for my NFS trafifc and assign another vif?  can this be done using existing ports assigned to vifs already or am I out ofl luck?  dont' want to get too complicated with second level vifs or anything crazy like that.

[radek_kubka]

Hi,

Why not use e0M port for management purposes? This doc describes configuration details:

http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3950.pdf page 15.

Also, bear in mind you can have multiple VLANs on top of the same vif interface.

Regards,
Radek

[sninan]

I don't have a e0m port and I usually strive for physical seperation of the vlans but with my limited number of ports I might have to settle on ahving multiple vlans on top of the same interfafe or create one vif (vif0) and attach vlans.  is there anyway to control which port each vlan uses if you create one single vif?

[scottgelb]

You can create multiple vlans on a vif (ifgrp).  With ONTAP 7.3 and lower if you use vlans then the base vif interface can't be used...only vlans on the interface.  With ONTAP 8.x you can use vlans and also the base vif without a vlan which was a nice addition to networking features.  As long as you won't push more traffic than the vif can handle, many of our customers use multiple vlans on a single vif (with multiple ports behind it) and it works well.  Make sure you have the partner interface configured and the trunks available on the partner node and you are good to go... also consider negotiated failover (nfo) so that a failure of the entire vif will cause a failover to the partner.

[sninan]

in my previous netapp experince I have created vifs with vlans using multple ports and isolated traffic for mgmt, iscsi, and nfs ( 2 ports each), with this setup I know what ports the traffic is going through and the traffic is somewhat isolated.  i've inherited a san now with 4 ports but i owuld like to use the same protocals.   In my current setup and having only 4 ports, I was planning on  putting all 4 ports into one vif and using IP aliasing as a laod balancing.  I still don't ahve physical seperation but as long as they are load balanced I guess it doesn't matter what physical ports they are using.