The latest version of DataONTAP, 5.3.5, mentioned something about doing load-balancing across the links of a VIF. I have not delved into it any further, but can a NetApp person tell me if the new version indeed does load balancing across the VIF links (of course, on sending data from the NetApp to the client)?
--john
-----Original Message----- From: Michael S. Keller [mailto:mkeller@mail.wcg.net] Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2000 11:01 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Help with vif's
Arthur Darren Dunham wrote:
have the Catalyst set up properly. Can someone out there who's done this before tell me what we need to do on the cat? Do I need to put the vif commands into the rc file? Thanks in advance,
The cisco (unless they've changed something recently) has a limitation on how it sends packets across the links. Packets destined for the truck will be hashed onto a link by the last two bits of the hardware source address. That means if most of your traffic is coming from a single router port, it's all going to get hashed down to only one link.
The answer I received from NetApp, with a similar situation, was that the switch XORs the last two bits of source and destination MAC addresses, then uses that to choose the outgoing port within an EtherChannel trunk.
With only four clients making heavy use of the VIFs, MACs clustered. With hundreds of clients, you should see a more even distribution.
I built a truth table that showed then-current and desired states, then altered client MAC addresses.
Does that answer the question?