Creating a single-mode vif

You might want to create a single-mode vif, in which only one interface is active at a time and the others are ready to take over if the active interface fails. If you want a specific interface in a vif to be active, you need to specify that interface as preferred; otherwise an interface in the vif is randomly selected to be the active interface.

Before You Begin

You need to meet the following prerequisites to create a single-mode vif:

Decide on a case-sensitive name for the vif that meets the following criteria:
- It must begin with a letter.
- It must not contain any spaces.
- It must not contain more than 15 characters.
- It must not already be in use for a vif.
Decide on a list of the interfaces you want to combine into the vif.
Configure all interfaces that will be included in the vif to be down using the ifconfig command.

Considerations

If you have enabled IPv6 on your storage system, you can create a vif and then bring the vif interface status to "up." After this, the vif has two IPv6 addresses autoconfigured on it. Therefore, you need not manually configure the IP address for a vif, when IPv6 is enabled.

Steps

Enter the following command:

vif create single [interface_list]

vif_name is the name of the vif.

interface_list is a list of the interfaces you want the vif to consist of.
Enter the following command:
ifconfig vifname IP_address
vifname is the name of the vif.

IP_address is the IP address (for either IPv4 or IPv6) for this interface.

Example for creating a single-mode vif with IPv4 address

You can create a single-mode vif with the following command: vif create single SingleTrunk1 e0 e1

You can configure an IP address of 10.120.5.74 and a netmask of 255.255.255.0 on the single-mode vif SingleTrunk1, created in the first step, with the following command: ifconfig SingleTrunk1 10.120.5.74 netmask 255.255.255.0

Note: The operation performed using the vif create command is not persistent across reboots unless the command is added to the /etc/rc file.

Example for creating a single-mode vif with IPv6 enabled

When IPv6 is enabled on your storage system, you can create a single-mode vif, named vif1, with the following command: vif create single vif1 e0b

To make the interface status to "up," enter the following command: ifconfig vif1 up

The vif now has two autoconfigured addresses, as shown below:

ifconfig vif1
vif1: flags=948043<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,TCPCKSUM> mtu 1500
inet6 fe80::a0:98ff:fe08:618a prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x9 autoconf
inet6 3ffe:ff00:a0:98ff:fe08:618a prefixlen 64 autoconf
ether 02:a0:98:08:61:8a (Enabled virtual interface)

You can also manually configure an IPv6 address of 2001:0db8:85a3:0:0:8a2e:0370:99 for the vif with the following command: ifconfig vif1 2001:0db8:85a3:0:0:8a2e:0370:99