I have installed Redhat ES4 and I am attempting to allocate IBM SAN disks to be used via LVM. My question here is, IBMsdd requests that an update to the lvm.conf file is made for the filter field. I have replaced the filter with the following:

filter = ["a|vpath[a-z]|", "r|sd[b-z]|", "a/sda[1-9]/", "r/.*/"]



Once I put this entry, I rebooted and everything came up fine, I then attempted to do a vgcreate against my vpath's that were showing up and it created them successfully but the problem is that I have two internal disks(hardware raid setup) and when I created my disk layout I created two LVM's for OS and Non OS filesystems. After I did my vgcreate of the IBM disks, I could no longer display my original VG's.. Here is my current layout of my internal disk:


Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb3 6048352 229468 5511644 4% /
/dev/sdb1 101086 13781 82086 15% /boot
none 4082864 0 4082864 0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/NON_STAND_LOAD-home
20158332 86156 19048176 1% /home
/dev/mapper/STAND_LOAD-opt
10095152 80712 9501624 1% /opt
/dev/mapper/STAND_LOAD-tmp
15126920 73676 14284836 1% /tmp
/dev/mapper/STAND_LOAD-usr
15126920 2606544 11751968 19% /usr
/dev/mapper/STAND_LOAD-var
12095032 153936 11326696 2% /var


[root@hqoradev06 ~]# vgdisplay
--- Volume group ---
VG Name NON_STAND_LOAD
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 2
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 1
Open LV 1
Max PV 0
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size 41.28 GB
PE Size 32.00 MB
Total PE 1321
Alloc PE / Size 625 / 19.53 GB
Free PE / Size 696 / 21.75 GB
VG UUID ih5dR6-6Ndz-ih8S-uCBT-j1yi-g383-Xp4CsZ

--- Volume group ---
VG Name STAND_LOAD
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 5
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 4
Open LV 4
Max PV 0
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size 73.22 GB
PE Size 32.00 MB
Total PE 2343
Alloc PE / Size 1626 / 50.81 GB
Free PE / Size 717 / 22.41 GB
VG UUID nYyN5o-jG3H-Tqey-SWM9-yq8I-BYre-jODIJ2


Does anybody know why these VG's would disappear when I create a VG using the IBM vpath disks?? Once I deleted the VG that had the vpath's and copied back the original lvm.conf and rebooted the OS VG's came back.. Any idea?

Can anybody shed some light?? I have actually put an entry into lvm.conf and it seems as though I am getting things to work now.. I would like to know if this entry is correct when dealing with IBMsdd.. Also out of curiosity, can anybody explain this. I have two internal disks with hardware raid controller.. When I configure my disks the Redhat load tags the logical volume as sdb, why not sda?? Below are my entries in lvm.conf and a df output showing sdb..

[root@hqoradev06 ~]# grep filter /etc/lvm/lvm.conf
# A filter that tells LVM2 to only use a restricted set of devices.
# The filter consists of an array of regular expressions. These
# Don't have more than one filter line active at once: only one gets used.
#filter = [ "a/.*/" ]
filter = [ "a/sda[1-9]*/", "a/sdb[1-9]*/", "a/vpath[a-z]*/", "r/.*/" ]


[root@hqoradev06 ~]# df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb3 6048352 229552 5511560 4% /
/dev/sdb1 101086 13781 82086 15% /boot
none 4082864 0 4082864 0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/NON_STAND_LOAD-home
20158332 86156 19048176 1% /home
/dev/mapper/STAND_LOAD-opt
10095152 80712 9501624 1% /opt
/dev/mapper/STAND_LOAD-tmp
15126920 73656 14284856 1% /tmp
/dev/mapper/STAND_LOAD-usr
15126920 2606544 11751968 19% /usr
/dev/mapper/STAND_LOAD-var
12095032 154136 11326496 2% /var

Just a suggestion, check your modprobe.conf file and make sure your local disk controller is the first to load. Linux will name the first device it finds as sda.