For administrative convenience, ONTAP creates a failover group for each broadcast domain in the network architecture. Broadcast domains group ports that belong to the same layer 2 network. If you are using VLANs, for example, to segregate traffic by department (Engineering, Marketing, Finance, and so on), each VLAN defines a separate broadcast domain. The failover group associated with the broadcast domain is automatically updated each time you add or remove a broadcast domain port.

It is almost always a good idea to use a broadcast domain to define a failover group to ensure that the failover group remains current. Occasionally, however, you may want to define a failover group that is not associated with a broadcast domain. For example, you may want LIFs to fail over only to ports in a subset of the ports defined in the broadcast domain.