How to add a disk to LVM

LVM

Quick Notes First:

Formatting the new Disk

Suppose the Disk is /dev/sdb, the second scsi disk,

   fdisk /dev/sdb

   create as many partitions as you need using command n

   Label them with command t as 8e for making it Linux LVM

   Write and Exit with the command w.

Format the partitions you require using mkfs command

   mkfs -t ext3 -c /dev/sdb1

LVM commands

   pvcreate /dev/sdb1

   vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/sdb1

   lvextend -L 15G /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 ;for extending LogVol to 15GB

   lvextend -L+1G /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 ;for adding one more GB to Logical Volume LogVol01

   ext2online /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 ;for resizing the Logical Volumes

Thats it finished

Extra Instructions

Creating Physical Volumes for LVM

Since LVM requires entire Physical Volumes to be assigned to Volume Groups, you must have a few empty partitions ready to be used by LVM. Install the OS on a few partitions and leave a bit of empty space. Use fdisk under Linux to create a number of empty partitions of equal size. You must mark them with fdisk as type 0xFE. We created five 256MB partitions, /dev/hda5 through /dev/hda9.

Registering Physical Volumes

The first thing necessary to get LVM running is to register the physical volumes with LVM. This is done with the pvcreate command. Simply run pvcreate /dev/hdxx for each hdxx device you created above. In our example, we ran pvcreate /dev/hda5 and so on.

Creating a Volume Group

Next, create a Volume Group. You can set certain parameters with this command, like physical extent size, but the defaults are probably fine. We'll call the new Volume Group vg01. Just type vgcreate vg01 /dev/hda5.

When this is done, take a look at the Volume Group with the vgdisplay command. Type vgdisplay -v vg01. Note that you can create up to 256 LVs, can add up to 256 PVs, and each LV can be up to 255.99GBs! More important, note the Free PE line. This tells you how many Physical Extents we have to work with when creating LVs. For a 256MB disk, this reads 63 because there is an unused remainder smaller than the 4MB PE size.

Creating a Logical Volume

Next, let's create a Logical Volume called lv01 in VG vg01. Again, there are some settings that may be changed when creating an LV, but the defaults work fine. The important choice to make is how many Logical Extents to allocate to this LV. We'll start with 4 for a total size of 16MB. Just type lvcreate -l4 -nlv01 vg01. You may also specify the size in MBs by using -L instead of -l, and LVM will round off the result to the nearest multiple of the LE size.

Take a look at your LV with the lvdisplay command by typing lvdisplay -v /dev/vg01/lv01. You can ignore the page of Logical extents for now, and page up to see the more interesting data.

Adding a disk to the Volume Group

Next, we'll add /dev/hda6 to the Volume Group. Just type vgextend vg01 /dev/hda6 and you're done! You can check this out by using vgdisplay -v vg01. Note that there are now a lot more PEs available!

Moving Creating a striped Logical Volume

Note that LVM created your whole Logical Volume on one Physical Volume within the Volume Group. You can also stripe an LV across two Physical Volumes with the -i flag in lvcreate. We'll create a new LV, lv02, striped across hda5 and hda6. Type lvcreate -l4 -nlv02 -i2 vg01 /dev/hda5 /dev/hda6. Specifying the PV on the command line tells LVM which PEs to use, while the -i2 command tells it to stripe it across the two.

You now have an LV striped across two PVs!

Moving data within a Volume Group

Up to now, PEs and LEs were pretty much interchangable. They are the same size and are mapped automatically by LVM. This does not have to be the case, though. In fact, you can move an entire LV from one PV to another, even while the disk is mounted and in use! This will impact your performance, but it can prove useful.

Let's move lv01 to hda6 from hda5. Type pvmove -n/dev/vg01/lv01 /dev/hda5 /dev/hda6. This will move all LEs used by lv01 mapped to PEs on /dev/hda5 to new PEs on /dev/hda6. Effectively, this migrates data from hda5 to hda6. It takes a while, but when it's done, take a look with lvdisplay -v /dev/vg01/lv01 and notice that it now resides entirely on /dev/hda6!

Removing a Logical Volume from a Volume Group

Let's say we no longer need lv02. We can remove it and place its PEs back in the empty pool for the Volume Group. First, unmounting its filesystem. Next, deactivate it with lvchange -a n /dev/vg01/lv02. Finally, delete it by typing lvremove /dev/vg01/lv02. Look at the Volume Group and notice that the PEs are now unused.

Removing a disk from the Volume Group

You can also remove a disk from a volume group. We aren't using hda5 anymore, so we can remove it from the Volume Group. Just type vgreduce vg01 /dev/hda5 and it's gone!