How To Create LVM Using vgcreate, lvcreate, and lvextend lvm2... http://www.thegeekstuff.

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by Balakrishnan Mariyappan on August 5, 2010

8 Like 6 Tweet 6

LVM stands for Logical Volume Manager.

With LVM, we can create logical partitions that can span across one or more physical hard drives.
First, the hard drives are divided into physical volumes, then those physical volumes are combined
together to create the volume group and finally the logical volumes are created from volume group.

The LVM commands listed in this article are used under Ubuntu Distribution. But, it is the same for
other Linux distributions.

Before we start, install the lvm2 package as shown below.

$ sudo apt-get intall lvm2

To create a LVM, we need to run through the following steps.

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Select the physical storage devices for LVM

Create the Volume Group from Physical Volumes
Create Logical Volumes from Volume Group

Select the Physical Storage Devices for LVM – Use pvcreate, pvscan, pvdisplay
Commands

In this step, we need to choose the physical volumes that will be used to create the LVM. We can
create the physical volumes using pvcreate command as shown below.

$ sudo pvcreate /dev/sda6 /dev/sda7

Physical volume "/dev/sda6" successfully created
Physical volume "/dev/sda7" successfully created

As shown above two physical volumes are created – /dev/sda6 and /dev/sda7.

If the physical volumes are already created, you can view them using the pvscan command as shown
below.

$ sudo pvscan
PV /dev/sda6 lvm2 [1.86 GB]
PV /dev/sda7 lvm2 [1.86 GB]
Total: 2 [3.72 GB] / in use: 0 [0 ] / in no VG: 2 [3.72 GB]

You can view the list of physical volumes with attributes like size, physical extent size, total physical
extent size, the free space, etc., using pvdisplay command as shown below.

$ sudo pvdisplay
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sda6
VG Name
PV Size 1.86 GB / not usable 2.12 MB
Allocatable yes
PE Size (KByte) 4096
Total PE 476
Free PE 456
Allocated PE 20

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PV UUID m67TXf-EY6w-6LuX-NNB6-kU4L-wnk8-NjjZfv

--- Physical volume ---

PV Name /dev/sda7
VG Name
PV Size 1.86 GB / not usable 2.12 MB
Allocatable yes
PE Size (KByte) 4096
Total PE 476
Free PE 476
Allocated PE 0
PV UUID b031x0-6rej-BcBu-bE2C-eCXG-jObu-0Boo0x

Note : PE – Physical Extents are nothing but equal-sized chunks. The default size of extent is 4MB.

Create the Volume Group – Use vgcreate, vgdisplay Commands

Volume groups are nothing but a pool of storage that consists of one or more physical volumes. Once
you create the physical volume, you can create the volume group (VG) from these physical volumes
(PV).

In this example, the volume group vol_grp1 is created from the two physical volumes as shown
below.

$ sudo vgcreate vol_grp1 /dev/sda6 /dev/sda7

Volume group "vol_grp1" successfully created

LVM processes the storage in terms of extents. We can also change the extent size (from the default
size 4MB) using -s flag.

vgdisplay command lists the created volume groups.

$ sudo vgdisplay
--- Volume group ---
VG Name vol_grp1
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 2
Metadata Sequence No 1
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 0
Open LV 0
Max PV 0
Cur PV 2
Act PV 2
VG Size 3.72 GB
PE Size 4.00 MB
Total PE 952
Alloc PE / Size 0 / 0
Free PE / Size 952 / 3.72 GB
VG UUID Kk1ufB-rT15-bSWe-5270-KDfZ-shUX-FUYBvR

LVM Create: Create Logical Volumes – Use lvcreate, lvdisplay command

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Now, everything is ready to create the logical volumes from the volume groups. lvcreate command
creates the logical volume with the size of 80MB.

$ sudo lvcreate -l 20 -n logical_vol1 vol_grp1

Logical volume "logical_vol1" created

Use lvdisplay command as shown below, to view the available logical volumes with its attributes.

$ sudo lvdisplay
--- Logical volume ---
LV Name /dev/vol_grp1/logical_vol1
VG Name vol_grp1
LV UUID ap8sZ2-WqE1-6401-Kupm-DbnO-2P7g-x1HwtQ
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 0
LV Size 80.00 MB
Current LE 20
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 256
Block device 252:0

After creating the appropriate filesystem on the logical volumes, it becomes ready to use for the
storage purpose.

$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/vol_grp1/logical_vol1

LVM resize: Change the size of the logical volumes – Use lvextend Command

We can extend the size of the logical volumes after creating it by using lvextend utility as shown
below. The changes the size of the logical volume from 80MB to 100MB.

$ sudo lvextend -L100 /dev/vol_grp1/logical_vol1

Extending logical volume logical_vol1 to 100.00 MB
Logical volume logical_vol1 successfully resized

We can also add additional size to a specific logical volume as shown below.

$ sudo lvextend -L+100 /dev/vol_grp1/logical_vol1

Extending logical volume logical_vol1 to 200.00 MB
Logical volume logical_vol1 successfully resized

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Tags: LVM Commands, LVM GUI, LVM Mirror, LVM Performance, LVM Snapshot, LVM Tutorial

{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }

5 of 13 07-Jun-13 12:57 AM
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1 madrox007 August 6, 2010 at 1:42 am

This article is very good.

Please tell how to reduce the logical volume successfully.
That’s the tricky part.

2 Topper August 11, 2010 at 12:47 am

That’s simple – use lvreduce.

Tricky is how to make a LVM from USB HDD and to be mounted on restart – exmpl. mount first
USB storage and than mount as LVM2… I can’t do it on SuSE SLE

3 joofoo November 22, 2010 at 4:00 pm

When the partition is already in use and you are reducing it, you first have to reduce the
filesystem (e.g. run ‘resize2fs’ on the logical volume, in the case of ext2/ext3 filesystems), and
afterwards you use lvreduce. Otherwise you are running under serious risk of loosing your data!
(the reverse order applies with lvextend: After running lvextend, you will need to run resize2fs
to get usable space, when the partition is already in use)

4 Topper November 23, 2010 at 4:32 am

The user asks “Please tell how to reduce the logical volume successfully.”
I suppose he knows about file system

5 Gabriel Francisco August 1, 2011 at 2:17 pm

Topper

1 – reduce the filesystem. Ex: resise2fs /dev/vg0/lvol0 40G

2 – reduce the lv . ex : lvresise -L 30G logicalvol
3 – reduce the vg … etc..

6 Imran January 17, 2012 at 4:06 am

Nice article, an example of assigning entire disk can someone.

Use Free PE # to assign the full disk,
Free PE / Size 952 / 3.72 GB
In this case use Free PE # 952 ,this will assign the entire disk 3.72 GB, use -l and + sign.
#sudo lvextend -l +952 /dev/vol_grp1/logical_vol1
Also resize the file system resize2fs after extending the lvm
#sudo resize2fs /dev/vol_grp1/logical_vol1

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7 Imran January 17, 2012 at 4:14 am

Nice article, an example of assigning the entire disk.

Use Free PE # to assign the full disk, Free PE / Size 952 / 3.72 GB

In this case use Free PE # 952 ,this will assign the entire disk 3.72 GB, use -l and + sign.

#sudo lvextend -l +952 /dev/vol_grp1/logical_vol1

Alo resize the file system resize2fs after extending the lvm
#sudo resize2fs /dev/vol_grp1/logical_vol1

8 Topper January 17, 2012 at 5:44 am

Not exactly, quoting:

4.1.11. I’m trying to fill my vg, and vgdisplay/vgs says that I have 1.87 GB free, but when I do
an lvcreate vg -L1.87G it says “insufficient free extends”. What’s going on?

The 1.87 GB figure is rounded to 2 decimal places, so it’s probably 1.866 GB or something. This
is a human-readable output to give you a general idea of how big the VG is. If you want to
specify an exact size, you must use extents instead of some multiple of bytes.

In the case of vgdisplay, use the Free PE count instead of the human readable capacity.

Free PE / Size 478 / 1.87 GB

^^^

So, this would indicate that you should do run

# lvcreate vg -l478

Note that instead of an upper-case ‘L’, we used a lower-case ‘l’ to tell lvm to use extents
instead of bytes.

In the case of vgs, you need to instruct it to tell you how many extents are available:

# vgs -o +vg_free_count,vg_extent_count

This tell vgs to add the free extents and the total number of extents to the end of the vgs
listing. Use the free extent number the same way you would in the above vgdisplay case.

9 xscousr January 20, 2012 at 10:28 am

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Here’s a question.
First some background

I have a CentOS 6.2 install with two a LVM2 VG group created across two block devices,
/dev/sda and /dev/sdb. These are two fiber channel SAN units, formatted as RAID 6 with 2 hot
spares.They are attached via two hba’s to the host.

Within the VG there are to lv’s, stripped across 20 disks.

LV Name /dev/test/XFStest
VG Name test
LV Name /dev/test/EXT4test
VG Name test

Problem: I have to downgrade to CentOS 5.6. The host server has its own disks,

I have not done anything to the current OS as of yet, i’m making sure I have all steps in place
prior to doing this. Can anyone here provide me with the proper method?

How do i restore the lvm and mount it to the newly installed 5.6 install?

I’ve backed up /etc/lvm

Thanks for any assistance

10 Topper January 20, 2012 at 1:09 pm

It could be easy only with lvs command but…

Quote:
Recovering The LVM Setup

The LVM configuration file cannot be created by an easy command like the mdadm.conf, but
LVM stores one or more copy(s) of the configuration file content at the beginning of the
partition. I use the command dd to extract the first part of the partition and write it to a text
file:

This could be helpfull for your case

I personally used this once in disaster recovery

Good luck

11 Linux March 22, 2012 at 12:04 am

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Hi,
I used this command to increase already created logical volumes..
lvextend -L+1806 /dev/vgroot/plat_var
Now when I do LV display, it shows me the increased size:
LV Name /dev/vgroot/plat_var
VG Name vgroot
LV UUID mO3lQ0-vAz8-bCqc-Al8Y-0mEi-BNEU-uhn36J
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 1
LV Size 14.69 GB
Current LE 470
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
– currently set to 256
Block device 253:4

But when I do df -kh, it did not showed up the updated size

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vgroot-plat_var1
3.9G 167M 3.6G 5% /var/var1
/dev/sda1 251M 21M 218M 9% /boot
tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm

When I go to /dev/.vgroot folder I see this mapping ” plat_var -> /dev/mapper/vgroot-

plat_var1″

Now I am not getting that even after increasing the size why it is not shown up in vgroot-
plat-var1

Can anyone suggest something on this…

12 Topper March 22, 2012 at 2:16 pm

Must extend AND file system with tool according your file system type.
But Gparted is already good choice.

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