Learn about LIF failover on ONTAP networks
Suggest changes
PDFs
LIF failover refers to the automatic migration of a LIF to a different network port in response to a link failure on the LIF's current port. This is a key component to providing high availability for the connections to SVMs. Configuring LIF failover involves creating a failover group, modifying the LIF to use the failover group, and specifying a failover policy.
LIF failover using failover groups is not supported for SAN protocol LIFs. Learn about SAN multipath and automatic LIF failover support.
A failover group contains a set of network ports (physical ports, VLANs, and interface groups) from one or more nodes in an ONTAP cluster. The network ports that are present in the failover group define the failover targets available to the LIF. A failover group can have cluster management LIFs, node management LIFs, intercluster LIFs, and NAS data LIFs assigned to it.
|
When a LIF is configured without a valid failover target, an outage occurs when the LIF attempts to fail over. You can use the network interface show -failover command to verify the failover configuration. Learn more about network interface show in the ONTAP command reference.
|
When you create a broadcast domain, a failover group of the same name is created automatically that contains the same network ports. This failover group is automatically managed by the system, meaning that as ports are added or removed from the broadcast domain, they are automatically added or removed from this failover group. This is provided as an efficiency for administrators who do not want to manage their own failover groups.
Beginning with ONTAP 9.19.1, the ONTAP system-defined failover group policy dynamically expands the failover targets for NAS data LIFs to potentially include any available ports in the broadcast domain on any available node in the cluster. You can apply the system-defined policy to any failover group. Prior to ONTAP 9.19.1, LIFs with this policy could fail over to only one other node in the cluster; if that node was out of quorum, the LIF would not failover, even if there were other nodes available.
Learn about automatic LIF failover on ASA r2 systems.