Hi Nayab,
The links Michael provided are very informative and gives you a great exposure towards VIF's creation and its concepts. But to give you high-level understanding on its functionality I will take couple of minutes to explain here:
Netapp MM (multi-mode) VIFs allow you to add reliability and performance to the filer's networking configuration. You can do it in multiple ways on NetApp filers:
1. Ethernet trunking, bonding, Etherchanneling or port channeling (Cisco).
2. The aggregation of multiple physical links gives us one big fast and high availability link.
3. A MultiMode VIF is NetApp’s term for EtherChannel or Port Channeling.
Defined Types:
Static MultiMode VIF
======================
1. Hard coded or static EtherChannel, the ports do not negotiate, there is no auto detection of the physical port status.
2. Static etherchannel has to be enabled on each port on the switch.
Myfiler> vif create multi
Dynamic MultiMode VIF
======================
1. It is a LACP EtherChanel. (IEEE 802.3ad)
2. This is intelligent and will take actions appropriately when a link is down, it sends a notification from switch to filer that a interface was removed. (which donot happend in static mode)
Myfiler> vif create lacp
Load Balancing Options:
=======================
MAC Load-Balancing
Round Robin
Source and Destination Pairs
IP based Load Balanding
Examples:
========
1. Setup Static MultiMode VIF using e0a-d.
myfiler> vif create multi vif01 -b ip e0a e0b e0c e0d
myfiler> ifconfig vif01 172.28.45.10 netmask 255.255.255.0 mtusize 1500 partner cisco-partner-001
myfiler> ifconfig vif01 alias 172.28.45.11 netmask 255.255.255.0
myfiler> ifconfig vif01 alias 172.28.45.12 netmask 255.255.255.0
myfiler> ifconfig vif01 alias 172.28.45.13 netmask 255.255.255.0
2. Setup LACP Dynamic MultiMode VIF using e0a-d.
myfiler> vif create lacp vif01 -b ip e0a e0b e0c e0d
myfiler> ifconfig vif01 172.28.45.10 netmask 255.255.255.0 mtusize 1500 partner cisco-partner-001
myfiler> ifconfig vif01 alias 172.28.45.11 netmask 255.255.255.0
myfiler> ifconfig vif01 alias 172.28.45.12 netmask 255.255.255.0
myfiler> ifconfig vif01 alias 172.28.45.13 netmask 255.255.255.0
