Understanding vifs

About vifs

Vifs are a feature in Data ONTAP that implements link aggregation on a filer. This feature provides a mechanism to group together multiple network interfaces (links) into one logical interface (aggregate). After being created, a vif is indistinguishable from a physical network interface.

Vifs are also referred to by the following terms by different vendors:

Virtual aggregations
Link aggregations
Trunks
EtherChannel

Advantages of vifs

Vifs provide several advantages over individual network interfaces, such as

Higher throughput because multiple interfaces work as one interface.
Fault tolerance; if one interface in a vif goes down, the filer can stay connected to the network using the other interfaces.
Protection against a switch becoming a single point of failure.

Filer interfaces before grouping into a vif

The following figure shows four separate filer interfaces, e3a, e3b, e3c, and e3d, before grouping into a vif.

Filer interfaces after grouping into a vif

The following figure shows the four filer interfaces grouped into a single vif called Trunk1.