The import locking scheme works well in an environment where disk groups are not normally shifted from one system to another. However, consider a setup where two hosts, Node A and Node B, can access the drives of a disk group. The disk group is initially imported by Node A, but the administrator wants to access the disk group from Node B if Node A crashes. Such a failover scenario can be used to provide manual high availability to data, where the failure of one node does not prevent access to data. Failover can be combined with a "high availability" monitor to provide automatic high availability to data: when Node B detects that Node A has crashed or shut down, Node B imports (fails over) the disk group to provide access to the volumes.

Veritas Volume Manager can support failover, but it relies on the administrator or on an external high-availability monitor, such as VCS, to ensure that the first system is shut down or unavailable before the disk group is imported to another system.

See the vxdg(1M) manual page.