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 compared with the UDID that is set in the disk's private region. If the UDID values do not match, the udid_mismatch
flag is set on the disk. This flag can be viewed with the vxdisk
list
command.
A new set of vxdisk
and vxdg
operations are provided to handle such disks; either by either writing the DDL value of the UDID to a disk's private region, or by tagging a disk and specifying that it is a cloned disk to the vxdg
import
operation.
The following is sample output from the vxdisk
list
command showing that disks c2t66d0s2
, c2t67d0s2
and c2t68d0s2
are marked with the udid_mismatch
flag:
c0t0d0s2 auto:cdsdisk - - online
c0t1d0s2 auto:cdsdisk - - online
c2t64d0s2 auto:cdsdisk - - online
c2t65d0s2 auto:cdsdisk - - online
c2t66d0s2 auto:cdsdisk - - online udid_mismatch
c2t67d0s2 auto:cdsdisk - - online udid_mismatch
c2t68d0s2 auto:cdsdisk - - online udid_mismatch