Page 121 of the Network Management Guide for DataONTAP 7.3 states…

The 10GbE TOE NIC cards have a number of limitations when used with vifs. They include:

• Multimode vif limited to two (2) 10GbE TOE NICs

• LACP not supported with 10GbE TOE NICs

• TOE functionality disabled on 10GbE NIC in vif

In a multimode vif, DataONTAP controls only outbound packets. The link used for inbound packets is decided upon by the device at the other end of the vif. I’m not an expert in this area but assume that TOE won’t work because each TOE card wouldn’t know what packets the other has processed in terms of inbound traffic.

If the processor on the filer is not being maxed out, wouldn’t it make sense to turn off TOE anyway and just let the filer do the processing?

-Tim Hollingworth-

-ePlus Technology Inc.-

From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of James Beal
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2008 12:16 PM
To: Ed Wilts
Cc: Page, Jeremy; toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: Re: issues with 10G Ethernet.

On 29 Sep 2008, at 16:36, Ed Wilts wrote:

From what I've heard, you can use TOE but only in an active/passive configuration.  So if you have 2 10GigE ports on your card with each going to a separate switch, as long as you only use 1 active path at a time, you'll be fine.  You'll have full failover and TOE, but you won't have 20GigE of bandwidth available.

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Page, Jeremy <jeremy.page@gilbarco.com> wrote:

What an unfortunate fix :(

I'd very much like to use TOE on my 10gig VIF, does anyone know if this
is ever going to be supported, or is there an architectual reason why it
won't work?

Just for clarification if I have TOE turned on with 10G ethernet my units stop serving data with no cluster failover occurring.

At least with 7.2.5.1 with TOE turned off the units appear to be stable previously they where unstable whether TOE was active or not.