Now I'm curious.
If you have two filers clustered and with Gigabit NICs, then each filer has (at least) two Gigabit cards, with one card active and the second card being used only if a takeover occurs.
In this situation, what would you need to do to have redundant NICs? Would you need a third NIC in each filer?
That.... is a very interesting fringe case! :-)
Candidly, I don't know for a *fact* if there is anything in our software to stop you trying to "re-use" the secondary gigabit interface in one cluster partner (the one that would take over from the primary gigabit interface from the partner if said partner should fail) as the secondary interface of an in-system single-mode trunk. However, I very much hope that there is, and I have no reason to believe that this case wasn't thought of by our network development team (some real smart folk).
Why do I hope that there is a barrier there? Well, obviously there is a rather-far-out-on-the-fringe case that could stop a cluster from failing over if you attempted such a stunt. Picture a gigabit card failing in one of the systems in a cluster, so the secondary interface of the single-mode trunk (in the same system) takes over from it. Now the partner server fails.... Where is its gigabit interface going to go on the survivor (which is down to its last NIC)? Oh dear....
So in summary... don't do it. Not a good situation! ;-)
Keith