Hello,
We need to increase the network badnwidth to our 740. It has the bulitin ethernet port plus a quad card. The switch it's connected to is a catalyst 5500. My understanding is the vif on the Netapp is compatible with Etherchannel on the catalysts. We did the vif create on the Netapp (DOT 5.3.4r3) and combined all 4 quad card ports into one interface, it has an IP address, ifconfig shows them all as part of a virtual interface. But what do I need to do on the Cisco side? When testing this on a 520 in the past, we tried enabling etherchannel AND trunking on the ports, to no avail -- all data appears to be going through the 4th interface. vif stats <vifname> shows about 3 or 4 packets per second on e3a through e3c, and thousands through e3d. I figured that maybe it just counts the entire vif's packets on the e3d interface; is that correct? Even so, though, with heavy speed testing from multiples clients, all the data continued to go through the last port, and never broke 12 megabytes a second. I really suspect this is because we don't 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.
Meanwhile, all NFS/CIFS/HTTP requests received by the Netapp are going to go back out the same link they entered on. So unless your incoming data can come from multiple source addresses, you're not going to be able to even things out.
The sun Trunking software had an option to create packets on links in a round-robin fashion. I've never seen a similar ability for cisco etherchannel to round-robin packets that way.