Hi Patricia,
The versions of Ontap you are running only support FEC ("fast ether channel") and GEC ("gigabit ether channel") - that's really all your switch guy should need to know. The filer maintains a seperate static MAC for each interface, rotating MAC's etc is a switch feature and has nothing to do with what happens on the filer (or any other server with FEC).
In the case of CIFS connections (which bind to a MAC address) for your quad 100BaseT cards this means that each connection can still only acheive a theoretical maximum of 100Mbit/sec - your trunked "400Mbit" connection is the theoretical maximum aggregate throughput for 4 or more connections. So to make the most use of the trunk you need to have many concurrent client connections.
What the forum message you were looking at was getting at is that several connected clients may end up bound to the same interface based on the timing of their connections and the ARP responses they get - this is why some switches with FEC support "spoof" the target MAC's to round-robin the packets evenly across the ports (since the FEC enabled server or filer won't care about which interface it receives data on. Also the author of that comment made a good point about routing - you need a FEC enabled switch between the router and the filer trunk to prevent all packets from that router hitting the same NIC.
Data OnTap 6.2 and above support 802.3ad "dynamic link aggregation". If your switch supports 802.3ad you should upgrade the filers (providing your software support is paid up!) and use that method. Note that from the filer's perspective setting up an active/active trunk on 802.3ad is identical to FEC/GEC, however the switch configuration will be different.
Hope this helps.
regards,
Alan McLachlan Senior Systems Engineer Storage Management Solutions ASI Solutions www.asi.com.au Ph +61 2 6230 1566 Fax +61 2 6230 5343 Mobile +61 428 655644 e-mail amclachlan@asi.com.au
-----Original Message----- From: pdunkin@lucent.com [mailto:pdunkin@lucent.com] Sent: Wednesday, 29 January 2003 12:48 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: trunking questions
First, thanks again to all who responded to my questions about migration to a new switch.
The next question concerns NetApp support for trunking. Our F760 has two quad Ethernet cards, and our F740 has one. Each group of four is currently trunked together, and we would like to keep them that way.
The guy in charge of the new switch wants to know how NetApps support groupings: port based, address based, or round robin? This http://forums.netapp.com/conversation.asp?tid=1&vid=9553&thd=1&cid=51 says trunking is done on a per MAC address level, but in the archives of this list I saw references to round robin and didn't know if that may also be an option.
So, what should I tell the switch manager? And, if it's something that can be administered on the NetApp, what command or commands do you use, with what parameters? I think I understand the vif command, but the versions I have (Release 5.3.4R3 on the F740; Release 5.3.6R2 on the F760) don't seem to have a parameter that selects a trunking algorithm.
Thanks!