Probe-base vs link-based and Best Practice Recommendations for Network Configuration

There has been some question lately about configuring of the network interfaces focused about probe-base vs link-based.

In the document Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System: Best Practice Recommendations for Network Configuration [ID 1395461.1]

It does go over the recommended configurations.

There are two methods that are used by the appliance to determine if an interface is failed.

• Probe-based failure detection - this will issue an ICMP probe from each of the datalink-associated interfaces (the test interfaces) in the IPMP group in turn, to either a default gateway, or the first 5 systems on the same subnet that respond to a multicast ICMP probe. If 5 consecutive pings are unanswered the interface is considered failed. Please note that this does not necessarily mean that the device itself has physically failed. Indeed this is probably the least likely cause of the problem. See