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Configuring failover groups and policies for LIFs

LIF failover refers to the automatic migration of a LIF to a different network port in response to a link failure on the LIF's current port. This is a key component to providing high availability for the connections to SVMs. Configuring LIF failover involves creating a failover group, modifying the LIF to use the failover group, and specifying a failover policy.

A failover group contains a set of network ports (physical ports, VLANs, and interface groups) from one or more nodes in a cluster. The network ports that are present in the failover group define the failover targets available for the LIF. A failover group can have cluster management, node management, intercluster, and NAS data LIFs assigned to it.

Configuring LIF failover groups involves creating the failover group, modifying the LIF to use the failover group, and specifying a failover policy.

Attention
When a LIF is configured without a valid failover target, an outage occurs when the LIF attempts to fail over. You can use the network interface show -failover command to verify the failover configuration.

When you create a broadcast domain, a failover group of the same name is created automatically that contains the same network ports. This failover group is automatically managed by the system, meaning that as ports are added or removed from the broadcast domain, they are automatically added or removed from this failover group. This is provided as an efficiency for administrators who do not want to manage their own failover groups.

  • Creating a failover group
    You create a failover group of network ports so that a LIF can automatically migrate to a different port if a link failure occurs on the LIF's current port. This enables the system to reroute network traffic to other available ports in the cluster.
  • Configuring failover settings on a LIF
    You can configure a LIF to fail over to a specific group of network ports by applying a failover policy and a failover group to the LIF. You can also disable a LIF from failing over to another port.
  • Commands for managing failover groups and policies
    You can use the network interface failover-groups commands to manage failover groups. You use the network interface modify command to manage the failover groups and failover policies that are applied to a LIF.