When you create a volume group it is, by default, activated. This means that the logical volumes in that group are accessible and subject to change.

There are various circumstances for which you you need to make a volume group inactive and thus unknown to the kernel. To deactivate or activate a volume group, use the -a (--available) argument of the vgchange command.

The following example deactivates the volume group my_volume_group.

vgchange -a n my_volume_group

If clustered locking is enabled, add ’e’ to activate or deactivate a volume group exclusively on one node or ’l’ to activate or/deactivate a volume group only on the local node. Logical volumes with single-host snapshots are always activated exclusively because they can only be used on one node at once.

You can deactivate individual logical volumes with the lvchange command, as described in Section 4.4.8, “Changing the Parameters of a Logical Volume Group”, For information on activating logical volumes on individual nodes in a cluster, see Section 4.7, “Activating Logical Volumes on Individual Nodes in a Cluster”.