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Private and shared disk groups

Disk group types consist of the following:

In a cluster, most disk groups are shared. Disks in a shared disk group are accessible from all nodes in a cluster, allowing applications on multiple cluster nodes to simultaneously access the same disk. A volume in a shared disk group can be simultaneously accessed by more than one node in the cluster, subject to licensing and disk group activation mode restrictions.

You can use the vxdg command to designate a disk group as cluster-shareable. When a disk group is imported as cluster-shareable for one node, each disk header is marked with the cluster ID. As each node subsequently joins the cluster, it recognizes the disk group as being cluster-shareable and imports it. You can also import or deport a shared disk group at any time; the operation takes places in a distributed fashion on all nodes.

Each physical disk is marked with a unique disk ID. When cluster functionality for VxVM starts on the master, it imports all shared disk groups (except for any that have the noautoimport attribute set). When a slave tries to join a cluster, the master sends it a list of the disk IDs that it has imported, and the slave checks to see if it can access them all. If the slave cannot access one of the listed disks, it abandons its attempt to join the cluster. If it can access all of the listed disks, it imports the same shared disk groups as the master and joins the cluster. When a node leaves the cluster, it deports all its imported shared disk groups, but they remain imported on the surviving nodes.

Reconfiguring a shared disk group is performed with the co-operation of all nodes. Configuration changes to the disk group happen simultaneously on all nodes and the changes are identical. Such changes are atomic in nature, which means that they either occur simultaneously on all nodes or not at all.

Whether all members of the cluster have simultaneous read and write access to a cluster-shareable disk group depends on its activation mode setting.

See Activation modes of shared disk groups.

The data contained in a cluster-shareable disk group is available as long as at least one node is active in the cluster. The failure of a cluster node does not affect access by the remaining active nodes. Regardless of which node accesses a cluster-shareable disk group, the configuration of the disk group looks the same.

  Note   Applications running on each node can access the data on the VM disks simultaneously. VxVM does not protect against simultaneous writes to shared volumes by more than one node. It is assumed that applications control consistency (by using Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System or a distributed lock manager, for example).