VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes HP-UX 11i v2 Ninth Edition Manufacturing Part Number: 5900-0591 March 2010 Printed in the United States © Copyright 2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company L.P.
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VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes 9 New Features in VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 9 Features requiring special licenses 14 Features of Base-VXVM compared to LVM 14 VERITAS Base-VXVM 4.
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Preface The VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes provides information on the September 2005 release of VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1. Technical Support For license information contact: • Software License Manager http://licensing.hp.com/welcome.slm • HP Licensing Services contact http://licensing.hp.com/licenseAdmins.slm (Europe) contact: Phone: +353.(0)91.75.40.06 Email: codeword_europe@hp.com (U.S. and Canada) Phone: +1 650.960.5111 Email: hplicense.na@hp.com (Asia Pacific) Phone: 0120.42.
Typographic Conventions Table 1 describes the typographic conventions used in this document. Table 1 Typographic Conventions Typeface Usage Examples Computer output, files, directories, software elements such as command options, function names, and parameters Read tunables from the /etc/vx/tunefstab file. italic New terms, book titles, emphasis, variables replaced with a name or value See the VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notesfor details.
• VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Hardware Notes • VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes • VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Troubleshooting Guide • VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Migration Guide • VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Administrator’s Guide • VERITAS Enterprise Administrator (VEA 500 Series) Getting Started • VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.
1 VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes This document provides information on VERITAS Volume Manager Release 4.1. The VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 is supported on HP-UX 11i v2. The following topics are discussed in this document: • “New Features in VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1” on page 9 • “Features of Base-VXVM compared to LVM” on page 14 • “VERITAS Base-VXVM 4.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes New Features in VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 — Base-VXVM now supports persistent device names. The disk names, once assigned, will remain constant across reconfiguration and rebooting. — Device discovery is now multithreaded. Performance improvements have also been made to DMP. • Multi-Device Support Multi-Device Support allows several volumes to be represented by a single logical object.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes New Features in VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 • Dynamic LUN Expansion Previous releases of VXVM did not allow you to take advantage of a change in the size of a disk once the disk had been initialized; any attempt to do so would result in loss of data. However, in this release, Dynamic LUN capability allows you to resize the device while preserving the existing data.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes New Features in VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Instant (copy-on-write) snapshots are easier to configure and offer more flexibility of use than traditional third-mirror break-off snapshots. Once created, an instant snapshot is immediately available for use. For preference, new volumes should be configured to use instant snapshots, but this also requires rewriting of administration scripts that assume the traditional third-mirror snapshot model.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes New Features in VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 In this release, two temporary file systems are mounted for use by DMP. When they are mounted, output from the df command is similar to the following: # df Filesystem Kbytes Used avail Capacity Mounted on ...
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Features requiring special licenses Features requiring special licenses • The FlashSnap (FastResync and Dynamic Disk Group Split and Join and Storage Checkpoints ). • The VERITAS Cluster File System(CFS) • Quicklog Features of Base-VXVM compared to LVM The VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 for HP-UX (Base-VXVM) includes many features that are not available with LVM on HP-UX.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes VERITAS Base-VXVM 4.1 Licenses VERITAS Base-VXVM 4.1 Licenses The following table shows the supported features available with VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 licensing Table 1-1 Veritas Volume Manager Supported Features VxVM License Description of Supported Features Base Concatenation, spanning, rootability and root disk mirroring, multiple disk groups and VEA.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes VERITAS Base-VXVM 4.1 Licenses Table 1-2 VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 for HP-UX Feature Availability (Continued) Feature VERITAS Volume Manager 4.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes VERITAS Base-VXVM 4.1 Licenses VEA Graphical User Interface and SAM The VERITAS Enterprise Administrator (VEA) provides a Java-based graphical user interface for managing Base-VXVM. VEA has two parts: a server and a client. The server must run on the system running Base-VXVM. The client can run on the server machine, or the client software can be installed on a different HP-UX 11i version 2 system to manage Base-VXVM remotely.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Compatibility Information and Installation Notes Compatibility Information and Installation Notes Supported Platforms The following platforms are supported for VERITAS Volume Manager 4.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds Installation Issues Upgrading Systems Running VxVM 3.5 Prior to Command Cumulative Patch 06 Before upgrading a system that is running under VxVM 3.5 at a patch level prior to Command Cumulative Patch 06 (PHCO_30834), it is strongly recommended that you download and apply this patch, and then run the ckpublen.sh utility script.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds Adding a Log and Mirror to a Volume The vxassist command does not add a mirror and a log when processing a command such as the following: # vxassist mirror volume layout=log ... The mirror is added, but the log is silently omitted. To add a log and a mirror, add them in two separate vxassist invocations, as follows: # vxassist mirror volume ... # vxassist addlog volume ...
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds Base-VXVM and Multi-Host Failover Configurations Outside the context of clustering functionality, VxVM disk groups can be imported (made available) from only one host at any given time. When a host imports a disk group as private, the volumes and configuration of that disk group becomes accessible to the host.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds monitor to provide automatic high availability to data: when Node B detects that Node A has crashed or shut down, Node B imports (fails over) the disk group to provide access to the volumes. VxVM can support failover, but it relies on the administrator or on an external high-availability monitor to ensure that the first system is shut down or unavailable before the disk group is imported to another system.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds vxassist relayout Considerations • Problem: The vxassist relayout operation requires all mirrors in the volume to have the same layout (ref. incident 90840). • Workaround: If the volume contains mirrors with different layouts, then you need to relayout the mirror plexes to the same layout before performing the volume relayout operation.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds Subdisks are not Aligned on Cylinder Boundaries After a Relayout • When relayout is performed on a volume, VxVM does not grow subdisks such that they end on cylinder boundaries. If you subsequently increase the size of the volume, its subdisks are not grown using contiguous disk space.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds includes Disk Access (DA) records with information about the disk devices obtained by the vxconfigd scan pass. VxVM relies on the operating system kernel to notify it of disk status changes. The HP-UX kernel does not currently notify VxVM of disk status changes.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds If a disk fails while configuring VxVM with the vxconfigd daemon, the following problems occur: • The VxVM administrative commands cannot be run on the node on which the disk has failed. • Service groups timeout and fail in a clustered or HA environment as the VERITAS Cluster Server agents cannot communicate with vxconfigd daemon to determine the health of VxVM components.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds Target N_Port_id is = 0x000075 Target N_Port_id is = 0x000076 2. Run the following command on each disk found in step 1, specified by its N_Port_id setting: # fcmsutil TD_device_file replace_dsk nport_ID This is illustrated by the following example: # for nport in 6b 6c 6d 6e 71 72 73 74 75 76 > do > fcmsutil /dev/td0 replace_dsk 0x0000$nport > done 3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for all other paths that are affected, such as /dev/td1.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds DMP and HP Surestore Disk Array xp256 HP Surestore Disk Arrays xp256, xp512, and xp48 are supported with Dynamic Multipathing (DMP) in active/active mode. If Base-VXVM encounters devices with identical Base-VXVM Disk IDs, the VxVM software will give a preference to selecting the P-Vol as opposed to the S-Vol to resolve the conflict. This disk selection policy will work only for xp256 microcode revisions 5244 and above.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds • multiple FC10 disk systems connected to a single host through a hub If the vxdmpadm disable ctlr=ctlr_name command is used for the above configurations to disable I/O through a particular controller, I/O can be stopped through paths that were not intended by the user. If each FC10 disk system is individually connected to the host (using separate HBAs), the above mentioned feature functions correctly and as expected.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds To prevent this possibility in situations where mirrored volumes are not used, the threshold should be tuned to a sufficiently high value that is unlikely to be reached. For example, to change the value of dmp_failed_io_threshold to 16 hours (57600 seconds), modify the value defined in /kernel/drv/vxdmp.conf as shown here: dmp_failed_io_threshold=57600 After changing the value, reboot the system.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds have the same private region, and VxVM allows you to import only one of them; by default, it chooses P-Vol. If you want, however, you can import the split BC (S-Vol) onto a secondary host. VxVM and Older Quantum Disk Drives • Problem: The VxVM makes use of the kernel-to-kernel pass through ioctl SCSI command feature in HP-UX.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds HDS9500V Array Support Library In VxVM 3.5, support for the Hitachi Data Systems HDS9500V array was provided by the VRTShds9500v Array Support Library (ASL). Release 4.1 of VxVM includes built-in support for the HDS9500V array. If the VRTShds9500v ASL is currently installed on your VxVM 3.5 system, use the following command to remove this ASL before installing VxVM 4.1: # swremove VRTShds9500v If you have already upgraded to VxVM 4.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds Hot-Relocation Issues Impact of Hot-Relocation on Performance Except for rootvol and swapvol, hot-relocation does not guarantee the same layout of data or performance after relocation. It is therefore possible that a single subdisk that existed before relocation may be split into two or more subdisks on separate disks after relocation (if there is not enough contiguous space on a single disk to accommodate that subdisk).
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds seconds). In particular, shared disk groups are marked disabled and no information about them is available during this time. The vxconfigd program must therefore be started on the master first. Messages Caused by Open Volume Devices When a node aborts from the cluster, open volume devices in shared disk groups on which I/O is not active are not removed until the volumes are closed.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds Workaround: No action is required. This behavior is normal and is not the result of an error condition. File System Check of a Snapshot Normally, a file system would have no work to do when a snapshot is taken. However, if an SFCFS file system is not mounted, it is likely that the fsck of the snapshot will take longer than is usually necessary, depending on the I/O activity at the time of the snapshot.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds Volumes Not Started Following a Reboot During very fast boots on a system with many volumes, vxconfigd may not be able to auto-import all of the disk groups by the time vxrecover -s is run to start the volumes. As a result, some volumes may not be started when an application starts after reboot.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds Number of Columns in a RAID-5 ISP Volume If an ISP volume is created with the RAID-5 capability, the parameters ncols and nmaxcols refer only to the number of data columns, and do not include the parity column. For this reason, the actual number of columns that are created in such a volume is always one more than the number specified.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds Mirroring Disks • Problem: The Actions > Disk Mirror menu is incorrectly disabled if you do not have a full VxVM license. • Workaround: Use the vxmirror command line to mirror the disk. Using SAM to Launch the VEA Client • Problem: It is currently not possible to launch the VEA client from SAM. • Workaround: Until a patch to overcome this problem becomes available, you should use the command line interface to launch VEA.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds Workaround: Allow access to the local X server by using the following command: # xhost + [hostname] Disk Group Creation Failure with Duplicate Disk ID VEA fails to create a disk group with a duplicate disk ID, and gives no other options. Creating non-CDS disks By default, VEA always creates CDS disk groups, and will therefore initialize disks with the CDS format.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Known Problems and Workarounds Inaccuracies in ISP Attribute Fields The ISP User Template Wizard shows two "attribute value" fields rather than one "attribute value" and one "attribute name" field.
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes Patches and Fixes Patches and Fixes The VEA GUI patches PHCO_33080 and PHCO_33081 are not mandatory for customers using VEA on Itanium 2 montecito platform.
