LVM and other commands accessing storage devices hang when a device-mapper-multipath device has no active paths in RHEL

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • I unpresented a storage LUN from the system but forgot to flush the multipath map first, and now all LVM commands are hanging.
  • I removed a storage device and now all LVM commands hang.
  • When I issue commands that access my storage devices and I have a multipath map with all paths failed, the command hangs indefinitely. Multipath messages in syslog show
 Sep 20 20:54:56 hostname multipathd: mpatha: remaining active paths: 0
  • When attempting to perform LVM commands (lvremove, lvcreate, vgdisplay, etc.) on a server, some of the commands hang and never come back.  They resist 'kill -9'.  Is there a way of bringing them back or stopping the processes without rebooting as a last resort?

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6
  • device-mapper-multipath
  • One or more multipath maps using queue_if_no_path, and having no active paths remaining (all failed/faulty in multipath -ll output).

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