You can modify a LIF by changing the attributes, such as home node or current node, administrative status, IP address, netmask, failover policy, firewall policy, and service policy. You can also change the address family of a LIF from IPv4 to IPv6.

About this task

When modifying a LIF’s administrative status to down, any outstanding NFSv4 locks are held until the LIF’s administrative status is returned to up.

To avoid lock conflicts that can occur when other LIFs attempt to access the locked files, you must move the NFSv4 clients to a different LIF before setting the administrative status to down.
You cannot modify the data protocols used by an FC LIF. However, you can modify the services assigned to a service policy or change the service policy assigned to an IP LIF.

To modify the data protocols used by a FC LIF, you must delete and re-create the LIF. To make service policy changes to an IP LIF, there is a brief outage while the updates occur.
You cannot modify either the home node or the current node of a node-scoped management LIF.
When using a subnet to change the IP address and network mask value for a LIF, an IP address is allocated from the specified subnet; if the LIF’s previous IP address is from a different subnet, the IP address is returned to that subnet.
To modify the address family of a LIF from IPv4 to IPv6, you must use the colon notation for the IPv6 address and add a new value for the -netmask-length parameter.
You cannot modify the auto-configured link-local IPv6 addresses.
Modification of a LIF that results in the LIF having no valid failover target results in a warning message.

If a LIF that does not have a valid failover target attempts to fail over, an outage might occur.
You can modify the service policy associated with a LIF.
Beginning with ONTAP 9.11.1, the automatic iSCSI LIF failover is available on All-Flash SAN Array (ASA) series.

For pre-existing iSCSI LIFs, meaning LIFs created prior to upgrading to 9.11.1 or later, you can modify the failover policy to enable automatic iSCSI LIF failover.

The procedure you follow depends on the interface that you use—ONTAP System Manager or the CLI:

ONTAP System Manager

Beginning with ONTAP 9.12.0, you can use ONTAP System Manager to edit a network interface

Steps

Select Network > Overview > Network Interfaces.
Select > Edit beside the network interface you want to change.
Change one or more of the network interface settings. For details, see Create a LIF.
Save your changes.

CLI

Use the CLI to modify a LIF

Steps

Modify a LIF’s attributes by using the network interface modify command.

The following example shows how to modify the IP address and network mask of LIF datalif2 using an IP address and the network mask value from subnet client1_sub:
```
network interface modify -vserver vs1 -lif datalif2 -subnet-name client1_sub
```
The following example shows how to modify the service policy of a LIF.
```
network interface modify -vserver siteA -lif node1_inter1 -service-policy example
```
Verify that the IP addresses are reachable.

If you are using…

Then use…

IPv4 addresses

network ping

IPv6 addresses

network ping6