BCV devices fail to activate after reboot

[Martin M. Adato Jr.]

Hi,

We have a K420 machine we are using for Timefinder as a backup. However, every time we reboot (BCV are on split mode) the machine, the BCV devices fail to be activated with "quorum not present" error. We had to vgcfgrestore the volume groups to activate it. The lvmrc file has been checked also. Any idea why this happens. Any help would be appreciated.

[Manju Kampli]

Martin,

We do use BCV disks at our site, and do not have the problem you have been experiencing. But we don't activate the BCV disk's VG at the boot time to avoid a situation of activating the VG when there is sync happening. So what we do is, when ever the system is rebooted we check no sync is happening and do the VG activation. We are also looking at putting this in a startup script but so far we haven;t done yet.
In you r problem, Please check the following things after the system reboot:
1. Does /etc/lvmrc has the same disks
2. do pvdisplay on all BCV disks
3. does any BCV sync happened during ysstem reboot

when you do vgcfgrestore, does any of the above checks change the behaviour ? may be that will give you some clue to your question

Hope this helps,
Manju

[Martin M. Adato Jr.]

Hi Manju,

When you do the manual VG activation, do you use any other option for vgchange /(extra steps maybe?) ? Because we also tried doing the manual activation and it failed (-a y/also ignore quorum), however this is after the VG activation during boot up failed. To answer your questions:
1. /etc/lvmtab is the same (before & after boot up)
2. ioscan can see the disks (pvdisplay was not run)
3. BCV was split before system was rebooted

I'm not sure about your last question but after vgcfgrestore we're able to activate the disks.

[Jordan Bean]

Are the BCVs assigned to the same host as the primaries?

If so, the key here is the VGID on each PV. The BCVs cannot be imported into a new VG if their VGID matches the VGID of the existing primary VG. Before vgimport, vgchgid must be run against each BCV PV. If the BCV VG has already been imported, then vgcfgrestore must be done before it can be activated after every TimeFinder split.

[Martin M. Adato Jr.]

Jordan,

Nope. The primary is on another server. Would vgchgid help only when the primary and bcv are on the same hosts?

Thanks.

[Jordan Bean]

Correct. vgchgid is only necessary if the BCVs are imported on the same host as the primaries.

You have to perform a vgcfgrestore before activation? Has the primary vg been rebuilt recently? If so, you should export the bcv vg and import again.

[Varghese Mathew]

Hi,

We have faced a similar problem with one of our BCV's attached to a server K570. What we have done was- just exported the vg's and then imported it again (we have done it with volume group map file from the primary server - attached to the primary bcv in the paired setup).

Hope this helps
Cheers !!!
Mathew

[Tim D Fulford]

I did not see it mentioned above but

vgcahnge -a e -q n

should activate it withouit quorum of disks. (Im assuming here that the VG's are clustered)

Tim

[Deshpande Prashant]

Hi
I had a similar kind of setup, standard disks were mounted on one server and bcvs on another server. Every night we sync bcvs, split them, mount them back on second server for backups and for reporting database copy.
I used scripts to do this and I was doing vgchgid on all disks before I mounted them on another server, and then vgimport on the disk.

Thanks.
Prashant Deshpande.

[Martin M. Adato Jr.]

Hi,

Thanks for your inputs. We've had to install an LVM patch (can't remember what) and re-backup config files and mapfiles. After that problem has not occurred again. Sorry for the late feedback I'm having difficulty logging in to ITRC.

Martin