Working with logical volumes (part 2)

In this post I want to cover one of the most commonly used features of lvm, extending a logical volume. If you were following along with the last post, “Working with logical volumes part 1”, then you should already have a volume group with a couple of live volumes attached.

With lvm you can quickly and easily extend a Linux file system on the fly without interrupting any services.

Becoming familiar with our lvm environment.

The first thing we should do is become familiar with our current lvm environment. Open your terminal and type  sudo pvscan to find some basic information about your volume groups. After running pvscan you should see the following output (again assuming that you are following along from the previous post).

sudo pvscan
 PV /dev/sdb    VG vgtest          lvm2 [10.00 GiB / 6.00 GiB free]

From the above we can see a few things. First is the location of our physical volume (/dev/sdb). Next is the Volume group it is attached to “vgtest”. Last you can see the size, 10 GB with 6GB free.

You can get more detailed output with  pvdisplay

sudo pvdisplay
 --- Physical volume ---
 PV Name               /dev/sdb
 VG Name               vgtest
 PV Size               10.00 GiB / not usable 4.00 MiB
 Allocatable           yes
 PE Size               4.00 MiB
 Total PE              2559
 Free PE               1535
 Allocated PE          1024
 PV UUID               tVrpRc-U1yi-IMdP-ONog-jDFh-pjej-VfX9ct

Check the state of our current live volumes by running  lvscan

sudo lvscan
 ACTIVE            '/dev/vgtest/testlv' [2.00 GiB] inherit
 ACTIVE            '/dev/vgtest/omg_testlv' [2.00 GiB] inherit

In this case I have two logical volumes “testlv” and “omg_testlv” each of which is 2 GB in size. Once again we can see more information on these volumes by running  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

Running  vgdisplay much like  pvdisplay and  lvdisplay will output detailed information about our volume group.

sudo vgdisplay
 --- Volume group ---
 VG Name               vgtest
 System ID
 Format                lvm2
 Metadata Areas        1
 Metadata Sequence No  3
 VG Access             read/write
 VG Status             resizable
 MAX LV                0
 Cur LV                2
 Open LV               2
 Max PV                0
 Cur PV                1
 Act PV                1
 VG Size               10.00 GiB
 PE Size               4.00 MiB
 Total PE              2559
 Alloc PE / Size       1024 / 4.00 GiB
 Free  PE / Size       1535 / 6.00 GiB
 VG UUID               HkxLMU-ncGp-pKIc-l35e-Fbx0-EU80-Iublex

So, now that we have familiarized ourselves with the lvm environment that we previously set up, we know a few things.

  1. We have one physical volume, /dev/sdb which is 10 GB in size.
  2. That physical volume contains the volume group “vgtest”.
  3. The volume group vgtest contains two logical volumes “testlv” and “omg_testlv” each of which are 2 GB in size.

Resize a logical volume

Let’s resize one of our logical volumes. Both of our volumes are 2 GB, but lets make testlv 4 GB using the  lvextend command.

sudo lvextend /dev/vgtest/testlv -L 4G
  Size of logical volume vgtest/testlv changed from 2.00 GiB (512 extents) to 4.00 GiB (1024 extents).
  Logical volume vgtest/testlv successfully resized.

In this case I used the -L option to tell lvm that I wanted the final size of the volume to be 4 G, alternatively you could use “-L +2G” to the same effect. Or you can use lowercase L “-l” to specify extents directly. I suggest you read the man page for lvextend if you plan to use it on a regular basis.

Once again run  lvscan to verify that your volume has indeed expanded to 4 GB.

sudo lvscan
 ACTIVE            '/dev/vgtest/testlv' [4.00 GiB] inherit
 ACTIVE            '/dev/vgtest/omg_testlv' [2.00 GiB] inherit

Also notice that your /testlv file system has not changed. It is still 2 GB as far as the file system is concerned.

 df -h
Filesystem                     Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                       937M     0  937M   0% /dev
tmpfs                          949M     0  949M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                          949M  2.0M  947M   1% /run
tmpfs                          949M     0  949M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/fedora-root         26G  6.2G   18G  26% /
tmpfs                          949M   16K  949M   1% /tmp
/dev/sda2                      976M  140M  770M  16% /boot
/dev/sda1                      200M  9.5M  191M   5% /boot/efi
/dev/mapper/vgtest-testlv      2.0G   35M  2.0G   2% /testlv
/dev/mapper/vgtest-omg_testlv  2.0G   35M  2.0G   2% /omgtestlv
tmpfs                          190M   16K  190M   1% /run/user/42
tmpfs                          190M     0  190M   0% /run/user/1000

When you do an extend operation keep in mind that you must also grow the underlying file system in order to make the additional space usable.

We formatted our file system as xfs in the last tutorial so we will use  xfs_growfs to allow the file system to use the additional storage space.

 sudo xfs_growfs /testlv
meta-data=/dev/mapper/vgtest-testlv isize=512    agcount=4, agsize=131072 blks
         =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
         =                       crc=1        finobt=1 spinodes=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               bsize=4096   blocks=2560, version=2
         =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0
data blocks changed from 524288 to 1048576

Check the size again with  df -h This time you should notice that /testlv is now 4 GB.

 df -h
Filesystem                     Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                       937M     0  937M   0% /dev
tmpfs                          949M     0  949M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                          949M  2.0M  947M   1% /run
tmpfs                          949M     0  949M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/fedora-root         26G  6.2G   18G  26% /
tmpfs                          949M   16K  949M   1% /tmp
/dev/sda2                      976M  140M  770M  16% /boot
/dev/sda1                      200M  9.5M  191M   5% /boot/efi
/dev/mapper/vgtest-testlv      4.0G   37M  4.0G   1% /testlv
/dev/mapper/vgtest-omg_testlv  2.0G   35M  2.0G   2% /omgtestlv
tmpfs                          190M   16K  190M   1% /run/user/42

The  lvextend command has another option “-r” that will automatically increase the size of the file system without the need to call an additional command to extend the file system. Try it on the “omg_testlv” volume.

 sudo lvextend /dev/vgtest/omg_testlv -L 4G -r
  Size of logical volume vgtest/omg_testlv changed from 2.00 GiB (512 extents) to 4.00 GiB (1024 extents).
  Logical volume vgtest/omg_testlv successfully resized.
meta-data=/dev/mapper/vgtest-omg_testlv isize=512    agcount=4, agsize=131072 blks
         =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
         =                       crc=1        finobt=1 spinodes=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               bsize=4096   blocks=2560, version=2
         =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0
data blocks changed from 524288 to 1048576

Notice this time the output of the  lvextend command includes the  xfx_growfs output. That is because lvm is smart enough to know how to resize common file systems for you, so that you only need to run one command to get the desired results.

Once you are done I suggest that you run through the initial familiarization steps again so that you can see the changes that we made in this tutorial. Compare the new output with the old.

In the next post we will add a new disk to volume group and learn how to move all of our data off of one disk and onto another.

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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