Administering Hot-Relocation

If a volume has a disk I/O failure (for example, the disk has an uncorrectable error), VERITAS Volume Manager (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.

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, see the section, How Hot-Relocation Works.

If hot-relocation is disabled or you miss the electronic mail, you can use the vxprint command or the graphical user interface to examine the status of the disks. You may also see driver error messages on the console or in the system messages file.

Failed disks must be removed and replaced manually as described in Removing and Replacing Disks.

For more information about recovering volumes and their data after hardware failure, see the VERITAS Volume Manager Troubleshooting Guide.