VERITAS Volume Manager 3.1 Administrator's Guide

Recovery
Detecting and Replacing Failed Disks
Chapter 8354
The cleanup phase requires one transaction. The vxunreloc utility
resets the comment field to a NULL string for all the subdisks marked
UNRELOC that reside on the destination disk. This includes cleanup of
subdisks that were unrelocated in a previous invocation of the
vxunreloc utility that did not successfully complete.
Detecting Failed Disks
The Volume Manager hot-relocation feature automatically detects disk
failures and notifies the system administrator of the failures by email. If
hot-relocation is disabled or you miss the email, view disk failures using
the vxprint command or by using the graphical user interface to view
the status of the disks. Driver error messages are also displayed on the
console or in the system messages file.
If a volume has a disk I/O failure (for example, because the disk has an
uncorrectable error), the Volume Manager can detach the plex involved
in the failure.
If a plex is detached, I/O stops on that plex but continues on the
remaining plexes of the volume. If a disk fails completely, the Volume
Manager can detach the disk from its disk group.
If a disk is detached, all plexes on the disk are disabled. If there are any
unmirrored volumes on a disk when it is detached, those volumes are
also disabled.
Partial Disk Failure
If hot-relocation is enabled when a plex or disk is detached by a failure,
mail listing the failed objects is sent to root. If a partial disk failure
occurs, the mail identifies the failed plexes. For example, if a disk
containing mirrored volumes fails, you can receive mail information as
shown in the following example:
To: root
Subject: Volume Manager failures on host teal
Failures have been detected by the VERITAS Volume
Manager:
failed plexes:
home-02
src-02
See “Modifying the vxrelocd Process” for information on how to send the
mail to users other than root.