Logical Volume Manager (Linux)

LVM available in Linux allows manage multiple physical volumes or entire hard disks. It supports among other functionalities:

• Create single logical volumes of multiple physical volumes or entire hard disks
• Add or remove volumes/disk dynamically
• Increase or decrease size of Logical Volumes (LVs)
• Create snapshots

LVM introduces the concept of Volume Groups (VGs) and Logical Volumes (LVs).

Basic commands

• List Volume Groups:/vgs/
  • /vgscan/, /vgextend/, /vgdisplay/
• List logical volumes: /lvs/, /lvdisplay/
• Resize LV:
  • lvresize
  • lvextend
  • lvreduce

• Display commands:

/pvdisplay/

/lvdisplay/

/vgdisplay/

• Create commands:

/pvcreate/

/lvcreate/

/vgcreate/

• Ls commands: /pvs/, /lvs/, /vgs/
• Scan commands: /pvscan/, /vgscan/
• PV commands: /pvdisplay/, pvresize, /pvscan/, /pvcreate/ or /pvcreate/ -vv
• LV commands: /lvcreate/, lvconvert
• VG commands: /vgdisplay/, /vgcreate/, vgcfgbackup, /vgscan/
• LVM commands: lvm dumpconfig

Advanced commands

• lvchange — Change attributes of the Logical Volume Manager.
• lvmdiskscan — Scan for all devices visible to LVM2.
• lvmdump — Create lvm2 information dumps for diagnostic purposes.

Activities

Basic

1. Read StackOverflow LVMs questions: https://superuser.com/questions/tagged/lvm?tab=Votes
2. Configure an LVM Volume with an ext File Sytem: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/high_availability_add-on_administration/s1-lvmsetupnfs-haaa

Advanced

Before doing these exercises make your you have a backup of your data.

1. Convert a Linear Device to a RAID device: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html-single/configuring_and_managing_logical_volumes/index#proc_converting-linear-to-raid-configure-manage-raid

See also

• mdadm and ZFS
• resize2fs file system resizer for ext2/ext3/ext4 (resize2fs /dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root) (for ext4 only).. Code: https://github.com/tytso/e2fsprogs/blob/master/resize/resize2fs.c
• KVM
• Ansible LV module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/lvol_module.html#lvol-module
• dmsetup

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Original Source: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Linux_Administration/Devices_and_Filesystems/LVM