Administering hot-relocation 381

How hot-relocation works

spares (marked spare) in the disk group where the failure occurred. It then relocates the subdisks to use this space.

If no spare disks are available or additional space is needed, vxrelocd uses free space on disks in the same disk group, except those disks that have been excluded for hot-relocation use (marked nohotuse). When vxrelocd has relocated the subdisks, it reattaches each relocated subdisk to its plex.

Finally, vxrelocd initiates appropriate recovery procedures. For example, recovery includes mirror resynchronization for mirrored volumes or data recovery for RAID-5 volumes. It also notifies the system administrator of the hot-relocation and recovery actions that have been taken.

If relocation is not possible, vxrelocd notifies the system administrator and takes no further action.

Note: Hot-relocation does not guarantee the same layout of data or the same performance after relocation. The system administrator can make configuration changes after hot-relocation occurs.

Relocation of failing subdisks is not possible in the following cases:

The failing subdisks are on non-redundant volumes (that is, volumes of types other than mirrored or RAID-5).

There are insufficient spare disks or free disk space in the disk group.

The only available space is on a disk that already contains a mirror of the failing plex.

The only available space is on a disk that already contains the RAID-5 log plex or one of its healthy subdisks. Failing subdisks in the RAID-5 plex cannot be relocated.

If a mirrored volume has a dirty region logging (DRL) log subdisk as part of its data plex, failing subdisks belonging to that plex cannot be relocated.

If a RAID-5 volume log plex or a mirrored volume DRL log plex fails, a new log plex is created elsewhere. There is no need to relocate the failed subdisks of the log plex.

See the vxrelocd(1M) manual page for more information about the hot-relocation daemon.

Figure 12-1illustrates the hot-relocation process in the case of the failure of a single subdisk of a RAID-5 volume.