Skip to main content

Configure network ports overview

Contributors
PDFs

Ports are either physical ports (NICs) or virtualized ports, such as interface groups or VLANs.

Virtual local area networks (VLANs) and interface groups constitute the virtual ports. Interface groups treat several physical ports as a single port, while VLANs subdivide a physical port into multiple separate logical ports.

  • Physical ports: LIFs can be configured directly on physical ports.

  • Interface group: A port aggregate containing two or more physical ports that act as a single trunk port. An interface group can be single-mode, multimode, or dynamic multimode.

  • VLAN: A logical port that receives and sends VLAN-tagged (IEEE 802.1Q standard) traffic. VLAN port characteristics include the VLAN ID for the port. The underlying physical port or interface group ports are considered VLAN trunk ports, and the connected switch ports must be configured to trunk the VLAN IDs.

    The underlying physical port or interface group ports for a VLAN port can continue to host LIFs, which transmit and receive untagged traffic.

  • Virtual IP (VIP) port: A logical port that is used as the home port for a VIP LIF. VIP ports are created automatically by the system and support only a limited number of operations. VIP ports are supported beginning with ONTAP 9.5.

The port naming convention is enumberletter:

  • The first character describes the port type.
    "e" represents Ethernet.

  • The second character indicates the numbered slot in which the port adapter is located.

  • The third character indicates the port's position on a multiport adapter.
    "a" indicates the first port, "b" indicates the second port, and so on.

For example, e0b indicates that an Ethernet port is the second port on the node's motherboard.

VLANs must be named by using the syntax port_name-vlan-id.

port_name specifies the physical port or interface group.

vlan-id specifies the VLAN identification on the network. For example, e1c-80 is a valid VLAN name.