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Create ONTAP failover groups

Contributors netapp-barbe netapp-aaron-holt netapp-aherbin
PDFs

You create a failover group of network ports so that a LIF can automatically migrate to a different port if a link failure occurs on the LIF's current port. This enables the system to reroute network traffic to other available ports in the cluster.

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.

About this task

You use the network interface failover-groups create command to create the group and to add ports to the group.

  • The ports added to a failover group can be network ports, VLANs, or interface groups (ifgrps).

  • All the ports added to the failover group must belong to the same broadcast domain.

  • A single port can reside in multiple failover groups.

  • If you have LIFs in different VLANs or broadcast domains, you must configure failover groups for each VLAN or broadcast domain.

  • Failover groups do not apply in SAN iSCSI or FC environments.

Step

Create a failover group:

network interface failover-groups create -vserver vserver_name -failover-group failover_group_name -targets ports_list

  • vserver_name is the name of the SVM that can use the failover group.

  • failover_group_name is the name of the failover group you want to create.

  • ports_list is the list of ports that will be added to the failover group.
    Ports are added in the format node_name>:<port_number>, for example, node1:e0c.

The following command creates failover group fg3 for SVM vs3 and adds two ports:

network interface failover-groups create -vserver vs3 -failover-group fg3 -targets cluster1-01:e0e,cluster1-02:e0e
After you finish

  • You should apply the failover group to a LIF now that the failover group has been created.

  • Applying a failover group that does not provide a valid failover target for a LIF results in a warning message.

    If a LIF that does not have a valid failover target attempts to fail over, an outage might occur.

  • Learn more about network interface failover-groups create in the ONTAP command reference.