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LIF compatibility with port types

Contributors netapp-barbe netapp-thomi

LIFs can have different characteristics to support different port types.

Note When intercluster and management LIFs are configured in the same subnet, the management traffic might be blocked by an external firewall and the AutoSupport and NTP connections might fail. You can recover the system by running the network interface modify -vserver vserver name -lif intercluster LIF -status-admin up|down command to toggle the intercluster LIF. However, you should set the intercluster LIF and management LIF in different subnets to avoid this issue.

LIF

Description

Data LIF

A LIF that is associated with a storage virtual machine (SVM) and is used for communicating with clients. You can have multiple data LIFs on a port. These interfaces can migrate or fail over throughout the cluster. You can modify a data LIF to serve as an SVM management LIF by modifying its firewall policy to mgmt.

Sessions established to NIS, LDAP, Active Directory, WINS, and DNS servers use data LIFs.

Cluster LIF

A LIF that is used to carry intracluster traffic between nodes in a cluster. Cluster LIFs must always be created on cluster ports.

Cluster LIFs can fail over between cluster ports on the same node, but they cannot be migrated or failed over to a remote node. When a new node joins a cluster, IP addresses are generated automatically. However, if you want to assign IP addresses manually to the cluster LIFs, you must ensure that the new IP addresses are in the same subnet range as the existing cluster LIFs.

Cluster management LIF

LIF that provides a single management interface for the entire cluster.

A cluster management LIF can fail over to any node in the cluster. It cannot fail over to cluster or intercluster ports

Intercluster LIF

A LIF that is used for cross-cluster communication, backup, and replication. You must create an intercluster LIF on each node in the cluster before a cluster peering relationship can be established.

These LIFs can only fail over to ports in the same node. They cannot be migrated or failed over to another node in the cluster.

Node management LIF

A LIF that provides a dedicated IP address for managing a particular node in a cluster. Node management LIFs are created at the time of creating or joining the cluster. These LIFs are used for system maintenance, for example, when a node becomes inaccessible from the cluster.

VIP LIF

A VIP LIF is any data LIF created on a VIP port. To learn more, see Configure virtual IP (VIP) LIFs.