Creating an interface group

You can create an interface group—single-mode, static multimode, or dynamic multimode (LACP)—to present a single interface to clients by combining the capabilities of the aggregated network ports.

About this task

For a complete list of configuration restrictions that apply to port interface groups, see the network port ifgrp add-port man page.
In a single-mode interface group, you can select the active port or designate a port as nonfavored by running the ifgrp command from the nodeshell.
When creating a multimode interface group, you can specify any of the following load-balancing methods:
- port: Network traffic is distributed on the basis of the transport layer (TCP/UDP) ports.
  This is the recommended load-balancing method.
- mac: Network traffic is distributed on the basis of MAC addresses.
- ip: Network traffic is distributed on the basis of IP addresses.
- sequential: Network traffic is distributed as it is received.

Note: The MAC address of an ifgrp is determined by the order of the underlying ports and how these ports initialize during bootup. You should therefore not assume that the ifgrp MAC address is persistent across reboots or ONTAP upgrades.

Procedure

Use the network port ifgrp create command to create an interface group.

Interface groups must be named using the syntax a<number><letter>. For example, a0a, a0b, a1c, and a2a are valid interface group names.

For more information about this command, see the man pages.

The following example shows how to create an interface group named a0a with a distribution function of port and a mode of multimode:

network port ifgrp create -node cluster-1-01 -ifgrp a0a -distr-func port -mode multimode