Methods, systems, and computer program products for preventing concurrent execution of conflicting software operations on the same and different storage processors while avoiding the deadlocks are disclosed. According to one method, first and second instances of a first software utility for respectively executing on the first and second storage processors having access to a storage medium are provided. First and second instances of the second software utility for respectively executing on the first and second storage processors are also provided. A lock is provided to instances of the first utility. The lock makes exclusive the operations of checking for an activity query from instances of the second utility and receiving a query from instances of the second utility. A first operation implemented by the first utility may fail if the activity query has been received when the checking occurs.