Disk accessing commands fail to complete due to problems with some non-IBM disks

Certain disk commands, such as mmcrfs, mmadddisk, mmrpldisk, mmmount and the operating system's mount, might issue the varyonvg -u command if the NSD is backed by an AIX® logical volume.

For some non-IBM® disks, when many varyonvg -u commands are issued in parallel, some of the AIX varyonvg -u invocations do not complete, causing the disk command to hang.

This situation is recognized by the GPFS disk command not completing after a long period of time, and the persistence of the varyonvg processes as shown by the output of the ps -ef command on some of the nodes of the cluster. In these cases, kill the varyonvg processes that were issued by the GPFS disk command on the nodes of the cluster. This allows the GPFS disk command to complete. Before mounting the affected file system on any node where a varyonvg process was killed, issue the varyonvg -u command (varyonvg -u vgname) on the node to make the disk available to GPFS. Do this on each of the nodes in question, one by one, until all of the GPFS volume groups are varied online.