VERITAS Volume Manager 3.1 Administrator's Guide

Recovery
Plex and Volume States
Chapter 8362
NOTE No user intervention is required to set these states; they are maintained
internally. On a system that is operating properly, all plexes are
enabled.
Volume States
Some volume states are similar to plex states. The following are volume
states:
CLEAN—The volume is not started (kernel state is DISABLED) and
its plexes are synchronized.
ACTIVE—The volume has been started (kernel state is currently
ENABLED) or was in use (kernel state was ENABLED) when the
machine was rebooted. If the volume is currently ENABLED, the
state of its plexes at any moment is not certain (since the volume is in
use). If the volume is currently DISABLED, this means that the
plexes cannot be guaranteed to be consistent, but are made consistent
when the volume is started.
• EMPTY—The volume contents are not initialized. The kernel state is
always DISABLED when the volume is EMPTY.
• SYNC—The volume is either in read-writeback recovery mode
(kernel state is currently ENABLED) or was in read-writeback mode
when the machine was rebooted (kernel state is DISABLED). With
read-writeback recovery, plex consistency is recovered by reading
data from blocks of one plex and writing the data to all other writable
plexes. If the volume is ENABLED, this means that the plexes are
being resynchronized through the read-writeback recovery. If the
volume is DISABLED, it means that the plexes were being
resynchronized through read-writeback when the machine rebooted
and therefore still need to be synchronized.
• NEEDSYNC—The volume requires a resynchronization operation
the next time it is started.
The interpretation of these flags during volume startup is modified by
the persistent state log for the volume (for example, the DIRTY/CLEAN
flag). If the clean flag is set, an ACTIVE volume was not written to by
any processes or was not even open at the time of the reboot; therefore, it
can be considered CLEAN. The clean flag is always set in any case where