vgscan weirdness

[Jason Wellband]

We run HP-UX 11.23. On one of our SG cluster nodes, vgscan reports that it is unable to find all volumes in the volume group:

The Volume Group /dev/vgmcc7 was not matched with any Physical Volumes.

It also reports several volumes that cannot be matched to a volume group:

Following Physical Volumes belong to one Volume Group.
Unable to match these Physical Volumes to a Volume Group.
Use the vgimport command to complete the process.
/dev/dsk/c4t4d6
/dev/dsk/c4t4d7
/dev/dsk/c4t5d2
/dev/dsk/c4t5d3
/dev/dsk/c4t5d6
/dev/dsk/c4t6d1
/dev/dsk/c7t4d6
/dev/dsk/c7t4d7
/dev/dsk/c7t5d2
/dev/dsk/c7t5d3
/dev/dsk/c7t5d6
/dev/dsk/c7t6d1
/dev/dsk/c9t4d6
/dev/dsk/c9t4d7
/dev/dsk/c9t5d2
/dev/dsk/c9t5d3
/dev/dsk/c9t5d6
/dev/dsk/c9t6d1
/dev/dsk/c12t4d6
/dev/dsk/c12t4d7
/dev/dsk/c12t5d2
/dev/dsk/c12t5d3
/dev/dsk/c12t5d6
/dev/dsk/c12t6d1

Running pvdisplay on one of these volumes reports:

pvdisplay: Warning: couldn't query all of the physical volumes.
pvdisplay: Couldn't retrieve the names of the physical volumes
belonging to volume group "/dev/vgmcc7".
pvdisplay: Cannot display physical volume "/dev/dsk/c7t4d7".

We've moved /etc/lvmtab to /etc/lvmtab.old and ran vgscan -a to recreate it. We've also run a vgexport for the volume group on the active cluster node and run vgimport on this node.

Running ioscan -fnC disk | grep 'OPEN-E' on this node shows us 484 lines. On other cluster nodes, we show 242 lines. Since this node is showing exactly double the other nodes, we are wondering if it could be a dual path issue.

We've gone so far as to remove all special files on this node for disks seen on the SAN and recreate them with insf -e. Is there anything else on the host that could be causing vgscan to report this error? We are suspecting that it may be that this node isn't seeing all the disks it should be seeing on the SAN but we want to ensure it's nothing host-related.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Sounds like there are multiple paths to these disks. Two fiber channel cards?

I'd remove the device files and start over.

insf -C disk

After the fiber connections are confirmed with fcmsutil

SEP

[Ganesan R]

Hi,

If all the disks are not visable for a given volume group then vgscan through this error. You should make sure that ioscan shows all the disks and alternate paths on both nodes before vgscan or vgexport/import process.

You can take one vg and compare on both nodes if all the disks are visable and matching exactly.