175Creating and administering disk groups
Handling disks with duplicated identifiers
Enable access to (import) a disk group
Menu: VolumeManager/Disk/EnableDiskGroup
Use this operation to enable access to a
disk group. This can be used as the final part of moving a disk
group from one system to another. The first part of moving a
disk group is to use the “Remove access to (deport) a disk
group” operation on the original host.
A disk group can be imported from another host that failed
without first deporting the disk group. Be sure that all disks
in the disk group are moved between hosts.
If two hosts share a SCSI bus, be very careful to ensure that
the other host really has failed or has deported the disk
group.
If two active hosts import a disk group at the same time, the
disk group will be corrupted and will become unusable.
Select disk group to import [<group>,list,q,?] (default: list)
newdg
Once the import is complete, the vxdiskadm utility displays the following
success message:
VxVM INFO V-5-2-374 The import of newdg was successful.
4 At the following prompt, indicate whether you want to import another disk
group (y) or return to the vxdiskadm main menu (n):
Select another disk group? [y,n,q,?] (default: n)
Alternatively, you can use the vxdg command to import a disk group:
# vxdg import diskgroup
Handling disks with duplicated identifiers
Advanced disk arrays provide hardware tools that you can use to create clones
of existing disks outside the control of VxVM. For example, these disks may have
been created as hardware snapshots or mirrors of existing disks in a disk group.
As a result, the VxVM private region is also duplicated on the cloned disk. When
the disk group containing the original disk is subsequently imported, VxVM
detects multiple disks that have the same disk identifier that is defined in the
private region. In releases prior to 5.0, if VxVM could not determine which disk
was the original, it would not import such disks into the disk group. The
duplicated disks would have to be re-initialized before they could be imported.
From release 5.0, a unique disk identifier (UDID) is added to the disk’s private
region when the disk is initialized or when the disk is imported into a disk group
(if this identifier does not already exist). Whenever a disk is brought online, the
current UDID value that is known to the Device Discovery Layer (DDL) is