Paul Taylor wrote:
I don't see why you would want to multi-home off of a quad card, though...
I disagree, but the netapp documentation is not helpful in clarifying this issue.
TIP_587 Etherchannel: Definition, Support and Usage (http://now.netapp.com/knowledge/contents/TIP/TIP_587.shtml)
States "the terms "Etherchannel" and "trunking" are used interchangeably", but those terms are not interchangeble in the Cisco world. Etherchannel links together multiple 10/100 Ethernet ports into one virtual port. Trunking provides the ability for multiple Vlans (read subnets) to communicate over a single port.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the vif command allows you to do the former, not the latter.
My recommendation is that you definitely want to multi-home if you are serving data on multiple subnets. Fast-Etherchannel doesn't get you any performance boost if you wind up having to route packets. If you have to serve up data on less than four subnets, then go with a hybrid route of multi-homing and use FastEtherchannel on the subnets where you have the most traffic.
The only problem we have experienced with multi-homing is that the automounter on our Unix boxes complains about the multiple mount points.
JT