If desired, select the interface(s) you want to assign to the target portal group. You do not have to select any interfaces in order to create a new target portal group; you can assign interfaces later. An interface does not have to be enabled for you to assign it to the target portal group.
The network interfaces in a target portal group collectively coordinate an iSCSI session. All TCP connections within an iSCSI session must use interfaces assigned to the same target portal group. Each interface can be assigned to one and only one target portal group.
Data ONTAP can be configured to support multi-connection iSCSI sessions. For more information, see the Data ONTAP Block Access Management Guide.
Data ONTAP allows a single host to access iSCSI LUNs over up to 16 different network data paths simultaneously. Data ONTAP does support multiple TCP connections over the same data path, but distinct data paths are needed to obtain the high availability and bandwidth aggregation benefit.
Note Your initiator software might support a lower maximum number of connections than the 16 connections supported by Data ONTAP. For details, see the documentation for your initiator software.
When assigning interfaces to target portal groups for clustered storage systems, make sure the interfaces on each storage system fail over to an interface assigned to a target portal group with the same tag on the partner storage system. If the target portal group tags do not match at the time of the takeover operation, the initiator will see a different mapping between the target portal and its target portal group. The mismatch can prevent the initiator from reestablishing the multi-connection session to the takeover storage system.