Why my Volume Group became off line after reboot in RHEL5?
Issue
- Volume groups that were working properly became off line and are not mounted after a reboot.
- The system uses IBM SDD multipath software and all disks are mapped as /dev/vpathxx1
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Environment
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 all releases
- IBM SDD software
Resolution
- Ensure that IBM SDD starts before the system try to mount the VG in order to allow the system to recognize /dev/vpathxx1 devices that compose the VG. Usually storage vendors who provide this kind of software make some changes in rc.sysinit or rc.local to start the software before the mount part.
- Contact IBM to obtain support support about this software.
Root Cause
- Volume group was created based on virtual mapping made by IBM SDD, using the command below:
# vgcreate -s 64 -v vgxx /dev/vpathxx1 /dev/vpathxx1 /dev/vpathxx1- This software must be started before the system mount the volumes. Otherwise, /dev/vpathxx1 will not existe and the system will not be able to mount the volume group based on these devices.
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