Linux LVM

In the past I have wrote lots of different little blurbs on LVM but I have been using it a lot and needed to document all the processes.  I will consolidate all my past posts into this one:

Logical Volume Management provides a great deal of flexibility allowing you to dynamically re-allocate blocks of space to different file systems.  Traditional volume manage relies upon strict partition boundaries separating and containerizing each mount point.  Logical Volume Management in linux takes control of the whole drive (or partition) carving it out into equal chunks called physical extents (PE).  Each PE is addressed by it’s logical extent (LE) address.  Groups of LE’s are grouped together to form logical volumes (LV) that are used to mount as file systems.   Then LV’s are grouped into volume groups (VG) for management purposes.

All of the information below is the command line versions of LVM management.  There are lots of quality GUI tools to manage LVM but since I rarely run graphical linux command line is my friend.

Display LVM Information

Display Physical Volume information – pvdisplay

This command will display information on the physical volumes.  Physical volumes fall along partition and traditional linux storage boundries.   This is how you will identify what physical disks are involved in your lvm’s

[root@linuxmonkey2 ~]# pvdisplay
 --- Physical volume ---
 PV Name               /dev/sdb3
 VG Name               storagevg
 PV Size               456.83 GB / not usable 15.15 MB
 Allocatable           yes
 PE Size (KByte)       32768
 Total PE              14618
 Free PE               1
 Allocated PE          14617
 PV UUID               3bwFUg-N06S-yTr9-BkoS-nndD-XcXz-G308fy

As you can see this displays a lot of information on the physical volume and some additional information on PE’s and volume group associated with the physical volume.

Display logical volumes – lvdisplay

This command will display information on the logical volumes.  Logical volumes are mountable partitions made up of one or more PE’s.   Logical volumes have to have a traditional file system placed upon them before they are usable.  This will help you identify what things can be mounted:

lvdisplay
 --- Logical volume ---
 LV Name                /dev/storagevg/storagelv01
 VG Name                storagevg
 LV UUID                GMp2kU-kAMc-ju8o-NJRB-hQ9u-CQ1O-dBi2mX
 LV Write Access        read/write
 LV Status              available
 # open                 1
 LV Size                456.78 GB
 Current LE             14617
 Segments               1
 Allocation             inherit
 Read ahead sectors     auto
 - currently set to     256
 Block device           253:2

LV Name provides a persistent path that can be mounted via fstab you could also mount it via UUID provided by this command.

Display Volume Group – vgdisplay

This command will display information on the volume group which is a grouping of physical volumes on your system.  (not presented by the graphic very well).  By adding multiple drives to a vg you can increase the size of a lv dynamically without getting larger hard drives.

[root@linuxmonkey2 ~]# vgdisplay
 --- Volume group ---
 VG Name               storagevg
 System ID
 Format                lvm2
 Metadata Areas        1
 Metadata Sequence No  2
 VG Access             read/write
 VG Status             resizable
 MAX LV                0
 Cur LV                1
 Open LV               1
 Max PV                0
 Cur PV                1
 Act PV                1
 VG Size               456.81 GB
 PE Size               32.00 MB
 Total PE              14618
 Alloc PE / Size       14617 / 456.78 GB
 Free  PE / Size       1 / 32.00 MB
 VG UUID               0csogH-bjz3-qP4z-JM63-YLpO-YpRy-Kqci71

This displays basic volume information in order to figure out what physical volumes are part of the vg use the pvdisplay command.

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