VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-587

Did you try forcibly importing the disk??

vxdg -s -f import diskgrp

It would help if you would state the OS, the VERITAS product, etc. In this case it appears you are trying to import a disk group in shared mode in Oracle RAC perhaps. You must import disk groups on the master node, you can determine the master with vxdctl -c mode.

OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3
VERITAS product: Veritas Cluster Server 4.0, VxVM 4.0, VxFS 4.0

I just want to import a disk group in a shared mode in my own application.

The output of command:

vxdctl -c mode

is

mode: enabled: cluster inactive

How do I make the cluster active?

To used shared mode you would have to have the Cluster Volume Manager and Cluster File System. The application would have to understand that two copies are running and be able to control the locking between nodes. This is done in applications such as Oracle RAC 9i which uses GAB and LLT as a transport between the nodes to trade info.

Using shared mounts between nodes where the apps were unaware (such as mounting a file system) would lead to trashing the file system. When the second node mounted the file system it would be aware of the current condition of the file system as it read the superblock. However, from that point on, the two nodes would not re-read the superblock, would have no idea of what was happening at the remote node in terms of allocation of blocks, directory changes, etc. They would overwrite each others data.

Mounting on the second node in a read only mode leads to inconsistent data as seen from the second node because it would not know if data had been updated and would assume blocks it had cached had not changed.

As a warning on forcing imports or any other operation, look up sfdisk in RH Linux man pages, the definition for force is:

-f or --force: Do what I say even if it is stupid

I have tried forcibly importing the disk by:

vxdg -s -f import diskgrp

But still got the same error massage:

import failed: Operation must be executed on master.

How do I work around this?

You don't unless you have the product that supports it. Read my post about "vxdctl -c mode" to find the master.

Also the -f option for vxdg import is only in case the DG is missing disks. In that case, you can import it to replace the missing disks.

The output of command:

"vxdctl -c mode"

is

"mode: enabled: cluster inactive"

There is no indication of the master. Does it mean shared disk group is not supported?