VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes (5900-0591, March 2010)
VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Release Notes
Known Problems and Workarounds
Chapter 124
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. For details on how to clear locks and force an
import, see the vxdg(1M) manual page and the section on moving disk groups between
systems in the VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Administrator’s Guide.
Corruption of Disk Group Configuration
If vxdgimport is used with -C (clears locks) and/or -f (forces import) to import a disk group
that is still in use from another host, disk group configuration corruption is likely to occur.
Volume content corruption is also likely if a file system or database is started on the imported
volumes before the other host crashes or shuts down.
If this kind of corruption occurs, you can use the /usr/sbin/dgcfgrestore command to
restore the disk group configuration from a backup. (The disk group configuration daemon,
dgcfgdaemon, automatically makes a backup of a disk group configuration whenever it is
changed.) There are typically numerous configuration copies for each disk group, but
corruption nearly always affects all configuration copies, so redundancy does not help in this
case.
Disk group configuration corruption usually shows up as missing or duplicate records in the
configuration databases. This can result in a variety of vxconfigd error messages, including
errors such as:
Association not resolved
Association count is incorrect
Duplicate record in configuration
Configuration records are inconsistent
These errors are typically reported in association with specific disk group configuration
copies, but usually apply to all copies. The following is usually displayed along with the error:
Disk group has no valid configuration copies
See the VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Troubleshooting Guide for more information on VxVM
error messages.
The -t option to vxdg prevents automatic re-imports on reboot, and is necessary when used
with a host monitor that controls imports itself, rather than relying on automatic imports by
VxVM.