The purpose of either a full merge or a minimerge
recovery operation is to compare data on shadow set members to ensure
that all of them contain identical data on every logical block. Each
block is identified by its logical block number (LBN). During recovery
operations, application I/O continues but at a slower rate. A full
merge or minimerge operation is managed by one of the OpenVMS systems
that has the shadow set mounted. Throughout this manual, minimerge operation and merge operation refer to a
minimerge recovery operation and a merge recovery operation, respectively.
A full merge or minimerge operation is initiated
by any of the following events:
A system failure that
results in incomplete application writes.
A shadow set that enters
mount verification and then times out or aborts mount verification,
under certain conditions (as described in “Merge Resulting from Mount Verification Timeout”.
A system manager issues
a SET SHADOW/DEMAND_MERGE command.
Merge Resulting from Mount Verification Timeout |
 |
A shadow set that enters mount verification and
either times out or aborts mount verification enters a merge state,
if the following conditions are true:
There are outstanding
write I/O requests in the shadow driver's internal queues on
the system or systems on which it has timed out.
The shadow set is mounted
on other systems in the cluster.
The system on which the mount verification timed
out (or aborted mount verification) notifies the other systems on
which the shadow set is mounted that a merge operation is needed,
and then it disables the shadow set. (It does not dismount it.)
For example, if a shadow set is mounted on eight
systems and mount verification times out on two of them, those two
systems check their internal queues for write I/O. If any write I/O
is found, the shadow set is merged.
Merge Resulting from use of SET SHADOW/DEMAND_MERGE |
|
The SET SHADOW/DEMAND_MERGE command initiates a merge of a specified shadow set or of all shadow
sets. This qualifier is useful if the shadow set is created with the
INITIALIZE/SHADOW command without using the /ERASE qualfier.
For more information about using the SET SHADOW/DEMAND_MERGE command, see the HP OpenVMS
DCL Dictionary.
Comparison of Merge and Minimerge Operations |
|
In a full merge operation, the members of a shadow
set are compared with each other to ensure that they contain the same
data. This is done by performing a block-by-block comparison of the
entire volume. This can be a very lengthy procedure.
A minimerge operation is significantly faster.
By using information about write operations that are logged in volatile
controller storage or in a write bitmap on an OpenVMS system, volume
shadowing merges only those areas of the shadow set where the write
activity occurred. This avoids the need for the entire volume scan
that is required by full merge operations, thus reducing consumption
of system I/O resources.
Minimerges existed as controller-based prior to
the introduction of HBMM, and available only on the HSJ, HSC, and
HSD controllers.
Fast Minimerge and Minicopy Operations |
|
Volume Shadowing for OpenVMS Version 8.4 is enhanced to increase
the performance of minicopy and minimerge by “looking ahead”
of the next bit that is set in the write bitmap. The actual number
of QIOs between the SHADOW_SERVER and SYS$SHDRIVER is reduced by this
method allowing the minimerge and minicopy to complete fast.
