Veritas Volume Manager 5.0.1 Administrator's Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, November 2009

Figure 4-3
Example of a true serial split brain condition that cannot be resolved
automatically
Partial disk group
imported on host X
Partial disk group
imported on host Y
1. Disks A and B are imported
independently on separate hosts.
The actual and expected serial IDs
are updated independently on each
disk.
2. The disk group cannot be re-
imported on the cluster. This is
because the databases to not agree
on the actual and expected serial
IDs. You must choose which
configuration database to use.
Shared disk group fails to import
Disk A
Disk A = 1
Configuration
database
Expected A = 1
Expected B = 0
Disk B
Disk B = 1
Expected A = 0
Expected B = 1
Disk A
Disk A = 1
Expected A = 1
Expected B = 0
Disk B
Disk B = 1
Expected A = 0
Expected B = 1
Configuration
database
Configuration
database
Configuration
database
In this case, the disk group import fails, and the vxdg utility outputs error messages
similar to the following before exiting:
VxVM vxconfigd NOTICE V-5-0-33 Split Brain. da id is 0.1, while dm id
is 0.0 for DM mydg01
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-587 Disk group newdg: import failed: Serial Split Brain
detected. Run vxsplitlines
The import does not succeed even if you specify the -f flag to vxdg.
Although it is usually possible to resolve this conflict by choosing the version of
the configuration database with the highest valued configuration ID (shown as
the value of seqno in the output from the vxdg list diskgroup| grep config
command), this may not be the correct thing to do in all circumstances.
See “Correcting conflicting configuration information” on page 226.
See “About sites and remote mirrors” on page 487.
225Creating and administering disk groups
Handling conflicting configuration copies