Understanding vifs

About vifs

A feature in Data ONTAP that implements link aggregation on your storage system, vifs provide 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.

Different vendors also refer to vifs using these terms:

Virtual aggregations
Link aggregations
Trunks
EtherChannel

Advantages of vifs

Using vifs provides several advantages over using individual network interfaces, such as the following:

Higher throughput--Multiple interfaces work as one interface.
Fault tolerance--If one interface in a vif goes down, your storage system can stay connected to the network using the other interfaces.
No single point of failure--If the physical interfaces in a vif are connected to different switches and a switch goes down, your storage system stays connected to the network through the other switches.

Storage system interfaces before grouping into a vif

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

Storage system interfaces after grouping into a vif

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