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LIF failover overview

Contributors netapp-aherbin netapp-barbe
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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.

A failover group contains a set of network ports (physical ports, VLANs, and interface groups) from one or more nodes in a cluster. The network ports that are present in the failover group define the failover targets available for the LIF. A failover group can have cluster management, node management, intercluster, and NAS data LIFs assigned to it.

Important 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.

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.