VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Troubleshooting Guide (September 2004)

Recovery from Hardware Failure
Understanding the Plex State Cycle
Chapter 1
12
When first created, a plex has state EMPTY until the volume to which it is attached is
initialized. Its state is then set to CLEAN. Its plex kernel state remains set to
DISABLED and is not set to ENABLED until the volume is started.
Figure 1-2 Additional Plex State Transitions
After a system crash and reboot, all plexes of a volume are ACTIVE but marked with
plex kernel state DISABLED until their data is recovered by the vxvol resync task.
A plex may be taken offline with the vxmend off command, made available again using
vxmend on, and its data resynchronized with the other plexes when it is reattached
using vxplex att. A failed resynchronization or uncorrectable I/O failure places the
plex in the IOFAIL state.
The following section, “Listing Unstartable Volumes” on page 13 describes the actions
that you can take if a system crash or I/O error leaves no plexes of a mirrored volume in
a CLEAN or ACTIVE state.
For information on the recovery of RAID-5 volumes, see “Failures on RAID-5 Volumes”
on page 17 and subsequent sections.