Description of problem:

When a vm is cloned the PVs are copied to new disks. The new vm will have the same PV/VG, with the same PVID/VGID, but these will exist on new devices with different device ids. system.devices may also include PVs on external devices that are not changing. If real (non-devname) device ids are used in system.devices, lvm on the cloned vm will not see the PVs on the new devices. (These would typically be for the root VG.)

One existing method is to remove the system.devices file from the cloned image and then run vgimportdevices -a in the new vm. This is a problem if the external devices are not attached at the time.

Another method that's been tried is running vgimportdevices -a in the new vm without first removing the original system.devices. This causes problems because it causes duplicate entries for the same PVIDs, where one of the entries (from the original image) will have no matching device. The system.devices would require removing the stale entries.

One possible solution is adding a new option that would cause vgimportdevices to recognize that a PVID in system.devices exists on a new device, and replace the device id in the existing PVID entry. e.g. vgimportdevices --deviceidreplace.

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