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
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.