Art Hebert art@arzoon.com writes:

2 F760 filers clustered together, onboard ethernet (e0), 10/100 nic (e6) Cisco 6509 switch trunked together

I'm trying to get the e0 and e6 ports to work failover for each other and ideally load balance to get better performance.

A multi-mode vif will, when attached to a switch or set of interfaces on another host capable of trunking, balance network load across its constituent links. Most switches distribute the load across the links by hashing an incoming packet's source and destination address. Thus, if incoming packets share the same source and destination address, they will flow over the same link. This may be what is biting you here.

Of course, you need to configure the switch to tell it that the switch ports you connected to the filer's e0 and e6 ports comprise a trunk (or, to use Cisco terminology, an EtherChannel). If you don't do this, traffic will also flow over only one link.

I've been able to get the virtual interface running and fail the cluster and everything is fine but I can't get it to load balance (I even tried 4 clients hitting it copying 500mb files) and it seems to always want to use e0, even if I do a "vif favor e6"

"vif favor" is for use with single mode vifs only. I don't think this is your problem, but you don't need (and shouldn't use) "vif favor" in this configuration.

Here is my rc lines:

ifconfig e6 mediatype 100tx-fd ifconfig e0 mediatype 100tx-fd vif create multi vif01 e6 e0 vif favor e6 ifconfig vif01 `hostname`-e6 mediatype 100tx-fd partner vif01

^^^^^

When specifying the partner of a vif, use the IP address of the partner interface, not the interface name.

Does it matter what order the e6 and e0 commands come in, seems that it affects how vif stat reports?

Order shouldn't matter, save for statistics output.

Can I even use e0 and e6 together or should I have another card? its on the 32 bit bus and performance is half of e6.

The vif logic doesn't care. Whether the performance will be acceptable is your call.

Sam