While working as a Unix Admin , many a times i have experienced critical issues with Veritas Volume Manager. Most of the times its a heart stopping moment when you hear something is wrong with your disk Storage subsystem. After all , your data sits on Veritas. I am sure any Unix Admin worth his salt will agree with me.
But the beauty of Veritas is its simplicity. It stores objects in a very structured and systematic fashion and if you work out the problem logically you can solve it.
Here i present a typical issue which is encountered with Veritas Volumes i.e filesystems becoming stale or unmountable after a sudden power-off or a sudden loss of connectivity from SAN or HBA card. Moreover this is a very useful question for interviews as well.
Veritas throws I/O error , dont worry vxmend comes to your rescue ...... just unmount the filesystem forcefully with a '-f' and run below commands in sequence.
Vxmend......
Force the plex to go off ( its already stale)
# vxmend -o force off <plex>
Bring it on again ....
# vxmend on <plex>
Clean the plex of any errors as shown below:-
# vxmend fix clean <plex>
Start the volume.
# vxvol start<volume>
Run a fsck as usual
# fsck -F vxfs/dev/vx/rdsk/<diskgroup>/<volume>
Now mount the filesystem, it should be back up in a sane manner.
# mount -F vxfs /dev/vx/dsk/<diskgroup>/<volume> /mountpoint
I have always found Veritas to be very robust and powerful. Just keep learning without fear and worries. Cheers ............................
