LVM Boot fail

[Tom Dial <tddial@comcast.net>]

I have a virtual system that recently started requiring manual
intervention to complete boot. It is a qemu-kvm virtual machine with an
iSCSI pseudo-disk formatted as an LVM physical volume. The PV contains a
single volume group with 8 logical volumes, named for their mount points
on /:

  LV Name                boot
  LV Name                swap
  LV Name                tmp
  LV Name                root
  LV Name                usr
  LV Name                var
  LV Name                home
  LV Name                pub

Boot faults to an (initrd) prompt with a complaint that the /usr LV,
correctly identified by its UUID, does not exist. It does, but is not
activated. In fact, lvscan shows that only the root and swap LVs
are active, and the others are not.

Issuing the "vgchange -ay" command at the initrd prompt activates the
remaining LVs, and after exiting initrd shell startup continues normally
without further boot related issues.

I don't know of any system change might have affected booting. The VM is
used as a plex server and updated regularly using unattended upgrades,
but none of the updates since the last good boot stood out as a possible
culprit.

Rebuilding the initrd and reinstalling grub did not correct the problem.

Neither the host nor the guest VM is rebooted often, and it is not a
particularly serious problem now that it's known, but it would be better
gone. I'm not averse to doing work to sort this out, but would be
grateful for pointers to relevant documentation or other information, or
suggestions for fixing it. and wouldn't object to information about
fixing it, if anyone has encountered it previously.

Thanks
Tom Dial