Working with logical volumes (part 1)

Part one of working with logical volumes will cover the basic’s involved in creating logical volumes.

TL;DR

For those of you who just want the order of the commands.

sudo pvcreate </path/to/device>
sudo vgcreate <vgname> </path/to/device>
sudo lvcreate -n <lvname> -L <size> <vgname>
sudo mkfs.<filesystem> </path/to/lv>

What you need to follow this guide

  • A free disk (I used an empty virtual machine disk)
  • Any Linux distribution (In this example I’ll be using Fedora 26, but the commands are the same across the entire Linux spectrum)
  • LVM packages (lvm2 – usually pre-installed)

What is LVM?

Logical Volume Management (LVM) offers a way to abstract a disk, multiple disks, or disk partitions into one logical volume. LVM filesystems can be rearranged, resized, moved, removed, created, and deleted on the fly. They offer incredible flexibility when setting up a new system or when rethinking the storage layout of an existing system.

Logical Volume Management filesystems are made up of 4 major parts

  1. The physical device (physical volume)
    • This is the storage device or devices that will make up the volume group.
  2. The Volume Group
    • The volume group is essentially a disk or a group of physical devices that have been separated into a group. The Volume Group is just a pool of disks. It can contain just one disk (or partition), or many disks.
    • The volume group is a logical volume made up of physical volumes
  3. The Live Volume
    • the live volume is some portion of the volume group that will be dedicated to a particular filesystem. One volume group can have many live volumes.
  4. The filesystem
    • After you create a Live Volume you must format it into one of the many Linux filesystems. Most likely ext4 or xfs.

Here is what you should remember if you are new to LVM

  • Physical Volumes (the raw storage), make up Logical Volume Groups.
  • Volume Groups are a logical representation of physical devices.
  • Volume Groups contain Live Volumes which are formatted as filesystems.
  • Filesystems are responsible for storing your data.

Create a new Volume

Step one – identify your storage device

We can identify our storage devices using the fdisk command

sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 30 GiB, 32212254720 bytes, 62914560 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 0E3D261B-275C-49D0-8C9A-427B5CEEAD4F

Device       Start      End  Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sda1     2048   411647   409600  200M EFI System
/dev/sda2   411648  2508799  2097152    1G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda3  2508800 62912511 60403712 28.8G Linux LVM


Disk /dev/sdb: 10 GiB, 10737418240 bytes, 20971520 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/mapper/fedora-root: 25.8 GiB, 27703377920 bytes, 54108160 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/mapper/fedora-swap: 3 GiB, 3221225472 bytes, 6291456 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

The device I want is shown as “Disk /dev/sdb 10GiB”

Step two – create the physical volume

Use the pvcreate command to create the new physical volume.

sudo pvcreate /dev/sdb
  Physical volume "/dev/sdb" successfully created.

Step three – create the volume group

The vgcreate command, creates a new volume group

sudo vgcreate vgtest /dev/sdb
  Volume group "vgtest" successfully created

Step four – create a live volume

sudo lvcreate -n testlv -L 2G vgtest
  Logical volume "testlv" created.

Maybe another one

sudo lvcreate -n omg_testlv -L 2G vgtest
  Logical volume "omg_testlv" created.

lvcreate takes several arguments. You must specify a name, a size, and the volume group to attach it to.

Step five – make the filesystems

I’m formatting my filesystems as xfs in this case.

$ sudo mkfs.xfs /dev/mapper/vgtest-testlv
meta-data=/dev/mapper/vgtest-testlv isize=512    agcount=4, agsize=131072 blks
         =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
         =                       crc=1        finobt=1, sparse=0, rmapbt=0, reflink=0
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=524288, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0 ftype=1
log      =internal log           bsize=4096   blocks=2560, version=2
         =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0

$ sudo mkfs.xfs /dev/mapper/vgtest-omg_testlv
meta-data=/dev/mapper/vgtest-omg_testlv isize=512    agcount=4, agsize=131072 blks
         =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
         =                       crc=1        finobt=1, sparse=0, rmapbt=0, reflink=0
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=524288, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0 ftype=1
log      =internal log           bsize=4096   blocks=2560, version=2
         =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0

Step 3 – add the new filesystems to your fstab

Make a couple directories as mount points.

sudo mkdir /testlv
sudo mkdir /omgtestlv

Edit the /etc/fstab file and append the following.

/dev/mapper/vgtest-testlv /testlv               xfs     defaults        0 0
/dev/mapper/vgtest-omg_testlv /omgtestlv        xfs     defaults        0 0

Mount the filesystems

sudo mount -a

How do I know that this did something?

Check your filesystem with df

df -hT
Filesystem                    Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                      devtmpfs  938M     0  938M   0% /dev
tmpfs                         tmpfs     950M     0  950M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                         tmpfs     950M  2.4M  948M   1% /run
tmpfs                         tmpfs     950M     0  950M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/fedora-root       ext4       26G  5.6G   19G  24% /
tmpfs                         tmpfs     950M   28K  950M   1% /tmp
/dev/sda2                     ext4      976M  109M  800M  12% /boot
/dev/sda1                     vfat      200M  9.5M  191M   5% /boot/efi
tmpfs                         tmpfs     190M   24K  190M   1% /run/user/42
tmpfs                         tmpfs     190M   40K  190M   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/mapper/vgtest-testlv     xfs       2.0G   35M  2.0G   2% /testlv
/dev/mapper/vgtest-omg_testlv xfs       2.0G   35M  2.0G   2% /omgtestlv

Notice our new volumes in the output of df.

Verify the Logical Volume with lvdisplay

sudo lvdisplay
  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Path                /dev/vgtest/testlv
  LV Name                testlv
  VG Name                vgtest
  LV UUID                zw2JB7-gmmZ-4llC-FLf1-jJhE-B82R-Xz4Cxc
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Creation host, time fedora01, 2017-11-01 21:24:33 -0400
  LV Status              available
  # open                 1
  LV Size                2.00 GiB
  Current LE             512
  Segments               1
  Allocation             inherit
  Read ahead sectors     auto
  - currently set to     256
  Block device           253:2

  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Path                /dev/vgtest/omg_testlv
  LV Name                omg_testlv
  VG Name                vgtest
  LV UUID                h6eLKT-Aq5u-UXem-dgtA-OIXs-z901-lNRhNp
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Creation host, time fedora01, 2017-11-01 21:25:28 -0400
  LV Status              available
  # open                 1
  LV Size                2.00 GiB
  Current LE             512
  Segments               1
  Allocation             inherit
  Read ahead sectors     auto
  - currently set to     256
  Block device           253:3

If you are going to be working with LVM on a regular basis you will want to familiarize yourself with the following commands:

vgdisplay, vgscan, pvdisplay, pvscan, lvdisplay, lvscan

Helpful Links:

CentOS LVM Docs

Ubuntu LVM Docs

Luke has an RHCSA for Red Hat Enterpirse Linux 7 and currently works as a Linux Systems Adminstrator in Ohio.

This post, re-published here with permission, was originally published on Luke’s site here.



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