6.2 HP IBRIX 9000 Storage Network Best Practices Guide (TA768-96069, December 2012)

Figure 6 Two user VIFs and associated failover pairs
When this configuration is operating normally, normally, the FSNs are set up as follows.
FSN 1 has four active interfaces and two standby interfaces:
• bond0 is the cluster network interface.
• bond0:0 is a cluster network VIF for the active Fusion Manager.
• bond0:2 and bond0:4 are the two active User VIFs for file serving from FSN 1.
• bond0:3 and bond0:5 are not active, but are provisioned for failover of file serving duties
from FSN 2.
FSN 2 has three active interfaces and three standby interfaces:
• bond0 is the cluster network interface.
• bond0:0 is not active, but is provisioned to support Fusion Manager failover.
• bond0:2 and bond 0:4 are the two active User VIFs for file serving from FSN 2.
• bond0:3 and bond0:5 are not active, but are provisioned for failover of file serving duties
from FSN 1.
VLAN tagging
VLAN capabilities provide hardware support for running multiple logical networks over the same
physical networking hardware. Technically this is implemented by giving the network manager the
ability to control the broadcast domain that each network interface is allowed to see. Network
interfaces in the same broadcast domain act as if they were all connected to the same switch (or
network segment to be exact), as if each VLAN were a separate set of hardware.
To allow multiple packets for different VLANs to traverse the same physical interface, each packet
must have a field added that contains the VLAN tag. The tag is a small integer number that identifies
the VLAN to which the packet belongs. When an intermediate switch receives a “tagged” packet,
it can make the appropriate forwarding decisions based on the value of the tag.
In many implementations, the VLAN tag is added and/or stripped by a switch or component that
is internal to the networking infrastructure. The network interfaces at the endpoints do not know
that they are using a VLAN.
When set up properly, the IBRIX platform supports VLAN tags being transferred all of the way to
the FSN network interfaces. The ability of the FSN to handle the VLAN tags natively in this manner
makes it possible for the FSN to support multiple VLAN connections simultaneously over a single
bonded interface.
NOTE: Only bonding modes 1 (A/P) and 4 (LACP) are supported with VLAN Tagging on IBRIX
platforms.
20 Overview of HP IBRIX 9000 Series networking