Avoid reboot after volume add via multipath

On SLES 12 SP4, I’ve added a volume on the SAN storage and modified multipath.conf for my needs.
Then, as stated on this document,
I’ve executed multipath reconfigure (I think that systemctl restart multipah is the same).

Now the volume is available.

The same document says: rebuild initrd using dracut -f and restart server.

My questions:
There is some way to avoid the server restart?
What happen if I rebuild initrd and I don’t restart the server, waiting for a better moment?

Thanks for help,
Fabrizio

Fabrizio

I have already performed this procedure (including LUN with multipath) several times, in none of them was the server restarted immediately.

I think that the recommendation of the documentation is for the activation of the new initrd, however, this can be done at another time, without the need to restart the server to use the new LUN.

I’m running SLES v15GA and also do not have to reboot following addition of storage devices to the multipathing configuration. Try
systemctl restart multipathd
Also, you can try
multipath -ll -v 2
The output should give you an idea if any devices are actually missing