We have an A400HA setup which has a 100G Naples Smart-IO card installed in slot 3 which is setup for the cluster LIFs
The controllers does however also have two internal 10G/25G ports on e0a/e0b which seems invisible to ONTAP, yet they are also interconnected just like the cluster LIFs...
Now I cannot seem to find the e0a/e0b ports anywhere else than the node shell's sysconfig -a
The question is what they are actually used for (maybe clustering) and if not, would it be possible to use them as normal NICs ?
#Question about the A400 cluster ports...
dusty socket
A little update... on the node shell I can see with ifconfig that the e0a/e0b have configured IP addresses within the cluster LIF subnets.. yet in another class... so e0a/e0b are in 169.254.18.0/24 while the LIFs I can see are on 169.254.0.0/16... but again, I can only find them in the node shell.. not in ONTAP (yet anyway...)
sudden spear
Hi.
Is this your case?
dusty socket
Thanks Alexandre, makes a bit more sense now... we actually also have an A400 pair in a Fabric-MC setup (two nodes in total), but here we do not use the these ports for anything. I guess they are only used for an IP based MC ? What a waste of ports 😉 Would have been nice to use them for serving data...
mortal jackal
The ports e0a and e0b are always used for the HA Interconnect. Even if there is no Metrocluster config on the system.
That's just how it is. On older platforms the HA Interconnect has been through the backplane (with the Infiniband protocol afaik). On some newer models this has been changed to dedicated ports.