About recovery from hardware failure

Symantec's Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) protects systems from disk and other hardware failures and helps you to recover from such events. Recovery procedures help you prevent loss of data or system access due to disk and other hardware failures.

If a volume has a disk I/O failure (for example, because the disk has an uncorrectable error), VxVM can detach the plex involved in the failure. I/O stops on that plex but continues on the remaining plexes of the volume.

If a disk fails completely, VxVM can detach the disk from its disk group. All plexes on the disk are disabled. If there are any unmirrored volumes on a disk when it is detached, those volumes are also disabled.

Note:

Apparent disk failure may not be due to a fault in the physical disk media or the disk controller, but may instead be caused by a fault in an intermediate or ancillary component such as a cable, host bus adapter, or power supply.

The hot-relocation feature in VxVM automatically detects disk failures, and notifies the system administrator and other nominated users of the failures by electronic mail. Hot-relocation also attempts to use spare disks and free disk space to restore redundancy and to preserve access to mirrored and RAID-5 volumes.

For more information about administering hot-relocation, see the Veritas Storage Foundation Administrator's Guide.

Recovery from failures of the boot (root) disk and repairing the root (/) and usr file systems require the use of the special procedures.

More Information

VxVM and boot disk failure