Unable to boot my Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system when it detects a Duplicate Volume Group using external storage
Environment
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
- HP Service Guard Cluster management software
- Shared volume groups
- Sybase database software
Issue
-
System unable to boot after disaster recovery testing
-
Going into recovery shell because it was failing fsck on a device
An error occurred during the file system check.
Dropping you to shell; the system will reboot when you leave the shell.
Give root password for maintenance.bash-3.2$
- Error when booting about duplicate volume group.
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup01: Existing 4QALCw-wBOD-joji-2Qzf-GFLz-2uk0-iK2cwJ (created here) takes precedence over UHG9ph-suCH-2V8B-wM0F-7DhM-I2Yd-hR8fB2
Found volume group "VolGroup01" using metadata type lvm2
Found volume group "VolGroup01" using metadata type lvm2
Resolution
-
Follow solution in Why does my system fail to boot and drop me to a shell on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5? to fully boot the system
or -
Ensure that LUN's that should only be presented to 1 host are only presented to 1 host.
- Ran vgdisplay and checked that the volume groups are only listed once.
Root Cause
- It appears that a LUN that should only be presented to 1 cluster node was inadvertently presented to both nodes in the cluster. This was causing a volume group name conflict because there was already a disk with that volume group name on that host.
Diagnostic Steps
-
Check the output of vgdisplay -vvv to see if there are any duplicate volume group entries:
Node 1:$ vgdisplay -vvv | grep WARNING
WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup01: Existing 4QALCw-wBOD-joji-2Qzf-GFLz-2uk0-iK2cwJ (created here) takes precedence over UHG9ph-suCH-2V8B-wM0F-7DhM-I2Yd-hR8fB2
WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup01: Existing 4QALCw-wBOD-joji-2Qzf-GFLz-2uk0-iK2cwJ (created here) takes precedence over UHG9ph-suCH-2V8B-wM0F-7DhM-I2Yd-hR8fB2
WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup01: 4QALCw-wBOD-joji-2Qzf-GFLz-2uk0-iK2cwJ (created here) takes precedence over UHG9ph-suCH-2V8B-wM0F-7DhM-I2Yd-hR8fB2
WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup01: 4QALCw-wBOD-joji-2Qzf-GFLz-2uk0-iK2cwJ (created here) takes precedence over UHG9ph-suCH-2V8B-wM0F-7DhM-I2Yd-hR8fB2
WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup01: Existing 4QALCw-wBOD-joji-2Qzf-GFLz-2uk0-iK2cwJ (created here) takes precedence over UHG9ph-suCH-2V8B-wM0F-7DhM-I2Yd-hR8fB2
WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup01: 4QALCw-wBOD-joji-2Qzf-GFLz-2uk0-iK2cwJ (created here) takes precedence over UHG9ph-suCH-2V8B-wM0F-7DhM-I2Yd-hR8fB2
WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup01: 4QALCw-wBOD-joji-2Qzf-GFLz-2uk0-iK2cwJ (created here) takes precedence over UHG9ph-suCH-2V8B-wM0F-7DhM-I2Yd-hR8fB2Node 2:
$ grep WARNING vgdisplay
<no output>
-
Check which disk is the one that is mistakenly presented to both nodes:
Node 1:$ vgdisplay -vvv | grep 4QALCw-wBOD-joji-2Qzf-GFLz-2uk0-iK2cwJ
VG UUID 4QALCw-wBOD-joji-2Qzf-GFLz-2uk0-iK2cwJ
$ vgdisplay -vvv | grep UHG9ph-suCH-2V8B-wM0F-7DhM-I2Yd-hR8fB2
VG UUID UHG9ph-suCH-2V8B-wM0F-7DhM-I2Yd-hR8fB2Node 2:
$ vgdisplay -vvv | grep 4QALCw-wBOD-joji-2Qzf-GFLz-2uk0-iK2cwJ
<no output>
$ vgdisplay -vvv | grep UHG9ph-suCH-2V8B-wM0F-7DhM-I2Yd-hR8fB2
VG UUID UHG9ph-suCH-2V8B-wM0F-7DhM-I2Yd-hR8fB2
-
Find out which device it is by looking through the output of vgdisplay -v:
$ vgdisplay -v
<some data omitted>
--- Volume group ---
VG Name vgsybtemp
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 6
VG Access read/write
VG Status exported/resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 2
Open LV 0
Max PV 64
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size 67.42 GB
PE Size 8.00 MB
Total PE 8630
Alloc PE / Size 7680 / 60.00 GB
Free PE / Size 950 / 7.42 GB
VG UUID 4QALCw-wBOD-joji-2Qzf-GFLz-2uk0-iK2cwJ
--- Physical volumes ---
PV Name /dev/dm-53
PV UUID 7qSez4-2DyH-hHYn-anwq-mcaM-s1Vm-hjOMiI
PV Status allocatable
Total PE / Free PE 8630 / 950 -
Device /dev/dm-53 is the device that needs to be removed from the system.
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