Guidelines for setting up VLANs in Data ONTAP

VLANs in Data ONTAP are implemented in compliance with the IEEE 802.1Q standard. Before creating and configuring LANs, you should follow certain guidelines about the type, MTU size, speed and media of the underlying interfaces.

The following guidelines apply when setting up VLANs in Data ONTAP:

You cannot set up VLANs by using the setup procedure.
You must use the command-line interface to create, change, or delete VLANs.
You must add the commands to create VLANs on the storage system to the /etc/rc file to make the VLANs persistent across reboots.
You can create any number of VLANs on a NIC (supporting IEEE 802.1Q) on the storage system.
However, Data ONTAP imposes a limit on the number of interfaces (including physical, interface group, VLAN, vh, and loopback interfaces) per storage system.
The maximum number of VLANs that you can configure is determined by the system memory:
- For systems with 2-GB memory, you can create a maximum of 128 VLANs.
- For systems with 6-GB memory, you can create a maximum of 256 VLANs.
- For systems with greater than 6-GB memory, you can create a maximum of 512 VLANs.
Note: VLAN tags 0 and 1 are reserved and not supported.
You can create VLANs on physical interfaces and interface groups.
You can configure IPv4 and IPv6 addresses on a VLAN interface.
You can use VLANs to support packets of different Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) sizes on the same network interface.
If a network interface is a member of multiple VLANs, you can specify different MTU sizes for individual VLANs.
You can assign an identification number ranging from 1 to 4094 to a VLAN.
You must ensure that the interface on your storage system is also a member of its partner's VLANs in an HA pair.
You cannot configure any parameters except mediatype for the physical network interface configured to handle VLANs.
You should set the same flow control settings for all the underlying physical network interfaces that constitute a VLAN.
You should set the flow control settings of all the network interfaces to none.