I solved the problem which was what spawned my original question -- what to do on the Cisco side, whether it's trunking or channeling. One single line command enabled channeling, it didn't work at first, but I turned it on and let it sit for a while and it started working. The reason we had had trouble with another netapp in the past was not because we had used the incorrect commands but that the Catalyst had an older blade in it that did not support etherchannel. When etherchannel is not setup all traffic apppears to go through the last port of the vif. Now, I still need to know whether the vifs persist through reboots or whether I need to place the commands into my rc file.
Justin Acklin
"Michael S. Keller" wrote:
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?
-- Michael S. Keller, Technical Solutions Consultant, Sprint Enterprise Network Services On loan to Williams Communications Group Voice 918-574-6094, Amateur Radio N5RDV