quickie on LVM

[hijinks]

So what are the benefits about running a filesystem with LVM.. well for one say you create a normal non-LVM setup with a 20gig home dir. Now over the next few weeks you download so much porn that its filled.. so your option is get a new drive and either move everything to the new drive or do some symlinking. Well if you created your /home partition under a LVM enviroment, you could just grow /home with the new drive and have that extra 400 gigs to download more porn.

 

IMO that is one of the biggest points to using LVM is it allows you to easily change the size of a partition. With that said you should never make / or /boot LVM.. this just creates evilness.. or so i've read.. So in my example I will have a extra partition I made on my sda drive called sda7 which has no filesystem on it or such

 

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
/dev/sda2              14        3200    25599577+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3            3201        5112    15358140   83  Linux
/dev/sda4            5113        9726    37061955    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            5113        5214      819283+  82  Linux swap
/dev/sda6            5215        5278      514048+  83  Linux
/dev/sda7            5279        9726    35728528+  8e  Linux LVM

 

I gave it a system type of LVM.. that is only needed for LVM v1.. most modern distros should ship with v2 now anyway. Ok now lets init that partition

 

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# pvcreate /dev/sda7
Physical volume "/dev/sda7" successfully created

 

Now you might get a partition not found error. I ran into this when i just created sda7 using fdisk. The only work around I found out was a reboot. You could also use pvcreate on a whole disk. Like if i had a sdb i could do it on the whole disk. There is no need to do it just on a partition.

 

Now we need to create out volume group. You might think of this as the extended partition which holds all the extended partitions. That might not be explaining it good enough but oh well..

 

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# vgcreate volume_group /dev/sda7
Volume group "volume_group" successfully created

 

Feel free to change volume_group to whatever identifier you want to use. You will notice how its used in a bit.. just hold on!

 

Ok now lets see if it worked

 

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# pvdisplay /dev/sda7
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name               /dev/sda7
VG Name               volume_group
PV Size               34.07 GB / not usable 0  
Allocatable           yes
PE Size (KByte)       4096
Total PE              8722
Free PE               8722
Allocated PE          0
PV UUID               i9r7Pt-o8Jl-bhSW-LfCN-lVlW-FPZX-ZYgvyM

 

Now you can see my pv name is the partition i used..

My volume group is what i used above. and you can see I have around 34gigs of space you allocate. So lets get down to using that all up now

 

So lets create a logical device for our old lady porn

 

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# lvcreate -L3000 -nporn_old_lady volume_group
Logical volume "porn_old_lady" created

 

Now lets create the filesystem. I shall use ext3 here

 

Code:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/volume_group/porn_old_lady

 

Now we can mount it

 

Code:

mount /dev/volume_group/porn_old_lady  /dump/

 

Now lets see it in all its glory

 

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# df -h | grep dump
                  2.9G   37M  2.8G   2% /dump

 

So you can see our size is 2.9gigs and we have used 37megs and we have aroudn 2.8gigs left. So you downloaded a ton of old lady porn and you want to grow your partition.. ok lets do it! Lets say we want to increase it to 7gigs

 

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# lvextend -L7G /dev/volume_group/porn_old_lady
Extending logical volume porn_old_lady to 7.00 GB
Logical volume porn_old_lady successfully resized

 

Now if you use ext3 you have to resize it.. so you have to umount it and do some magic

 

Code:

umount /dump
e2fsck -f /dev/volume_group/porn_old_lady
resize2fs /dev/volume_group/porn_old_lady
mount /dev/volume_group/porn_old_lady  /dump/

 

Now lets check out the new size

 

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# df -h | grep dump
                  6.9G   39M  6.6G   1% /dump

 

Yaya.. more space for old lady porn.. that would make randall happy. You can just see the benefits of using this if you are a hosting company or such. Now there is a ext2online patch you can apply to your kernel so you can resize it while its still mounted. I have never tried it.

[anyweb]

nice informative post as always hijinks

 

by the way, for those that don't know, Fedora Core's default filesystem setup is LVM

 

cheers

 

anyweb

[xDamox]

LOL! Nice one hijinks. :)

[xDamox]

I have been recently messing with LVM/Partition etc, instead of using fdisk to partition your hard disk

you should use parted as this will create the partitions on the fly and not require a reboot

[anyweb]

i used parted to create partitions on the fly before, and all was great, until i reboted.

 

then i had to reinstall the entire box

 

i must have made some mistake :(

 

cheers

anyweb

[xDamox]

yea anyweb one mistake with parted and your a f*cked, the reason is once you create a partition thats it

created.

[Tyrannus]

This is a great tutorial. I want to add two very useful commands when using LVM.

 

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# vgcfgbackup --help
vgcfgbackup: Backup volume group configuration(s)

vgcfgbackup
    [-d|--debug]
    [-f|--file filename]
    [-h|-?|--help]
    [--ignorelockingfailure]
    [-P|--partial]
    [-v|--verbose]
    [--version]
    [VolumeGroupName...]

 

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# vgcfgrestore --help
vgcfgrestore: Restore volume group configuration

vgcfgrestore
    [-d|--debug]
    [-f|--file filename]
    [-l[l]|--list [--list]]
    [-M|--metadatatype 1|2]
    [-n|--name VolumeGroupName]
    [-h|--help]
    [-t|--test]
    [-v|--verbose]
    [--version]
    VolumeGroupName

[Dungeon-Dave]

To add a few more points here:

 

1. reiserFS didn't need to be unmounted to resize it - "resize_reiserfs /dev/volume_gp/lv_name" will grow the filesystem to fit the enlarged logical volume

 

2. Newer version of EXT3 (and EXT4 now) support online resizing - and resiser is discontinued - so there is no need to unmount.

 

3. LVM can manipulated virtual partitions (logical volumes) much better than parted - such as migrating partitions between physical volumes whilst still in use. Parted is like a command-based version of "partition magic" but has some drawbacks: I have used it in the past to expand an EXT3 filesystem and it lost the journaling, reducing the filesystem to EXT2.

 

4. If manipulating a disk in use (eg: creating a partition on the root disk) then the kernel needs a reboot to re-read the tables. Parted attempts to keep them in memory, but there are issues with them being written back to the disk properly. If manipulating a disk currently unused (no filesystems mounted on it) then fdisk can change the partition tables without the kernel requiring a reboot.

 

Between the two, LVM is more complex than parted, but much more powerful (and has higher success rates). I would advise against parted on modern systems.

 

Warning: NEVER USE PARTED TO EXTEND A LOGICAL VOLUME!