lvresize -r + long uptime + reboot = lost Volume Group ?

[Nicoas C.]

Hello,

I have recently experienced the same problem on two RHEL servers : after
a clean shutdown of the system, the LVM Volume Group holding the root
(/) partition is lost.

Each time I was able to recover the configuration by restoring the
“/etc/lvm/backup/vgname” file from my backup software and executing a
“vgcfgrestore” command from a Live CD.

The servers are in version 5.11 (uptime : 7 months) and 6.6 (uptime : 2
months), both 64 bits.

They have a few things in common :

- VMware 5.5 virtual machines

- Only using RDM storage (no VMDK)

- Physical Volumes were created directly on the disk (e.g. /dev/sdd),
not on a classic partition with the LVM flag

- /boot was located on a non-LVM ext2 partition (1GB disk)

- The root partition was at one point increased online with the
command “lvresize -r -l +100%FREE vgname/lvname”

Has anybody seen this problem before ? Does it means that I need to
restart the server after an online resize of the root partition ? Can
this be caused by a kernel or lvm2 update ?

Thanks for your help,

Nicolas