Accessing SAN LV from two hosts, do I run pvcreate from both?

[Daniel Ölvebrink]

Hi,

I'm setting up a SAN, where I will be using and accessing a logical volume from two hosts, although only having one host mounting at the time.

I have got my one host to see the PV, VG and LV, the second host can see the physical device (LUN) from the SAN but cannot detect the PV using pcscan or VG using vgscan.

Do I have to run pvcreate from BOTH hosts until the second host will recognize that there is existing VGs and LVs on the physical device on the SAN?

Best Regards,
Daniel

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Daniel,

Prior to storing any data on the LUN, I would run pvcreate from both nodes.

pvcreate will not damage the data that is already on shared storage if you plan a vgimport.

SEP

[Daniel Ölvebrink]

Thanks. The problem I have here is that I am upgrading two servers who are using the same LV to a newer O/S release,

Server 1 is still on the old release, it can view and activate the LV correctly,

After upgrading Server 2, completely wiping the O/S, the server can still see the physical device (say /dev/sdb), but it cannot detect any physical volumes on it.

So I was thinking if I had to rerun pvcreate for this to happen. There is data on the partition.

Best Regards,
Daniel

[Daniel Ölvebrink]

I've investigated some more, could it be that the PV is created on a partition of the whole device? I.e. say /dev/sdb1,

--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sdb1

And this is why the pvscan cannot find a physical volume when scanning through the complete device?

What do I then need to do to be able to fix this?

[Matti_Kurkela]

So your servers are running different OS versions. What is the name of the Linux distribution you're using and what are the version numbers?

If your older server is running Linux kernel version 2.4.* and the newer uses kernel version 2.6.*, it is likely they are running different versions of Linux LVM. The LVM of the older kernel series is now called LVM1, and the modern version is LVM2.

LVM2 can understand LVM1 disks, but not necessarily vice versa.

Some distributions may have packaged this compatibility feature into an optional software package. This is distribution-specific, so knowing the name and version of the distribution(s) used is rather important.

MK

[Daniel Ölvebrink]

The server on which the LVM partitioning was created runs RedHat 7.2, the new operating system on which I have problems accessing the old LVM partitions is running RedHat Entetprise 4 Update 3.

Best Regards,
Daniel

[Brem Belguebli]

Hi,

RHEL 4u3 runs kernel 2.6 and LVM2 and is able to understand LVM1 pv's (RH 7).

You shouldn't have to pvcreate on the second node, as the information should be written in the LVM metadata on the disk if created with LVM2, but if I remmember well, with LVM1 metadata was in /etc/lvmtab, may be try a vgimport on all the vg's from node1 on node2

[Daniel Ölvebrink]

FYI

We did a reinstallation and recreation of LVM2 using RHEL4 Update 3 on both hosts, and it worked.

I'm not sure what caused the incompatability. I agree that according to LVM developers it should be backward compatible.