L­­ive!

Lab

Extending
Existing
Logical
Volumes
Contents Related Courses

Introduction 1
Red Hat CSA 7
Setting Up the Volumes 1

Extending a Volume Group 3

Related Videos
Moving Physical Extents 4

Extending Logical Volumes 5 Partitions on MBR

and GPT Disks

Working with
Logical Volumes

Extending Logical
Volumes, and Swap
to a System Non-
Destructively

Need Help?

Linux Academy
Community

Lab Connection Information

... and you can
• Labs may take up to five minutes to build always send in a
support ticket on
• The IP address of your server is located on the our website to talk
Live! Lab page to an instructor!

• Username: linuxacademy
• Password: 123456
• Root Password: 123456
Extending Existing Logical Volumes Linux Academy

Introduction
In a previous lab, we learned how to use the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) to create and manage
logical volumes. In this lab, we review these concepts and then learn how to extend and move volume
groups, physical extents, and logical volumes.

This lab contains three physical disks attached to the lab server that need to be configured with LVM.

Before you begin, log into your server, and switch to the root user or prepend the below commands with
sudo as a superuser.

Setting Up the Volumes

As in previous labs, you need to create the basic physical volumes, volume groups, and logical volumes.
If you do not remember how to do this, step-by-step instructions are provided below. More detailed
instructions are included with the Managing Logical Volumes on Red Hat Enterprise 7 lab guide.

Create a single partition from the /dev/xvdf disk:

[root@linuxacademy1 ~]# fdisk /dev/xvdf

Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.23.2).

Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
Device does not contain a recognized partition table
Building a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0xc1ab6071.

Command (m for help): n

Partition type:
p primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)
e extended
Select (default p):
Using default response p
Partition number (1-4, default 1):
First sector (2048-41943039, default 2048):
Using default value 2048
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (2048-41943039, default 41943039):
Using default value 41943039
Partition 1 of type Linux and of size 20 GiB is set

Command (m for help): w

The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.

Syncing disks.

-1-
Extending Existing Logical Volumes Linux Academy

Create a physical volume from the parition:

[root@linuxacademy1 ~]# pvcreate /dev/xvdf1

Physical volume “/dev/xvdf1” successfully created

[root@linuxacademy1 linuxacademy]# pvdisplay

“/dev/xvdf1” is a new physical volume of “20.00 GiB”
--- NEW Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/xvdf1
VG Name
PV Size 20.00 GiB
Allocatable NO
PE Size 0
Total PE 0
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 0
PV UUID pf5uvD-bAHa-o2cL-5VZ0-OWTM-gJD9-f55XrQ

Create the volume group, battlestar:

[root@linuxacademy1 ~]# vgcreate battlestar /dev/xvdf1

Volume group “battlestar” successfully created

Created a logical volume, galactica:

[root@linuxacademy1 linuxacademy]# lvcreate -n galactica -L 1G battlestar

Logical volume “galactica” created.

Create an XFS file system on the volume just created:

[root@linuxacademy1 battlestar]# mkfs -t xfs /dev/battlestar/galactica

meta-data=/dev/battlestar/galactica isize=256 agcount=4, agsize=65536 blks
= sectsz=512 attr=2, projid32bit=1
= crc=0 finobt=0
data = bsize=4096 blocks=262144, imaxpct=25
= sunit=0 swidth=0 blks
naming =version 2 bsize=4096 ascii-ci=0 ftype=0
log =internal log bsize=4096 blocks=2560, version=2
= sectsz=512 sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none extsz=4096 blocks=0, rtextents=0

Mount the volume:

[root@linuxacademy1 ~]# mkdir -p /mnt/myvolume

[root@linuxacademy1 !]# mount /dev/battlestar/galactica /mnt/myvolume

Create two files in the /mnt/myvolume directory:

[root@linuxacademy1 ~]# cd /mnt/myvolume; touch {file1,file2}

-2-
Extending Existing Logical Volumes Linux Academy

Extending a Volume Group

As part of our deployment plan, we need to add another disk to the system. This disk is intended to
replace the current xvdf1 disk, and we want to move the current data to the new disk (these are the files
we touched).

Create a new disk using gdisk for the /dev/xvdg disk; use the entire disk for a single parition:

[root@linuxacademy1 myvolume]# gdisk /dev/xvdg

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.6

Partition table scan:

MBR: not present
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: not present

Creating new GPT entries.

Command (? for help): n
Partition number (1-128, default 1):
First sector (34-41943006, default = 2048) or {+-}size{KMGTP}:
Last sector (2048-41943006, default = 41943006) or {+-}size{KMGTP}:
Current type is ‘Linux filesystem’
Hex code or GUID (L to show codes, Enter = 8300): 8e00
Changed type of partition to ‘Linux LVM’

Command (? for help): w

Final checks complete. About to write GPT data. THIS WILL OVERWRITE EXISTING
PARTITIONS!!

Do you want to proceed? (Y/N): y

OK; writing new GUID partition table (GPT) to /dev/xvdg.
The operation has completed successfully.

Create the physical volume:

[root@linuxacademy1 myvolume]# pvcreate /dev/xvdg1

Physical volume “/dev/xvdg1” successfully created

Extend the volume group, and display to ensure it has extended properly:

[root@linuxacademy1 myvolume]# vgextend battlestar /dev/xvdg1

Volume group “battlestar” successfully extended
[root@linuxacademy1 myvolume]# vgdisplay
--- Volume group ---
VG Name battlestar
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 2

-3-
Extending Existing Logical Volumes Linux Academy

Metadata Sequence No 3
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 1
Open LV 1
Max PV 0
Cur PV 2
Act PV 2
VG Size 39.99 GiB
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 10238
Alloc PE / Size 256 / 1.00 GiB
Free PE / Size 9982 / 38.99 GiB

You may have noticed that in this section we used gdisk and not fdisk, creating a GPT partition
(compared to fdisk’s MBR). We can migrate old MBR disks to GPT since we can copy the physical
extends from one partition to the other.

Moving Physical Extents

Each physical volume is divided into chunks of data called extents, which are covered more in-depth in
the initial LVM lab. It is possible to move extents between physical volumes, as long as there is open
space.

To move extents off xvdf1 we can use pvmove:

[root@linuxacademy1 myvolume]# pvmove /dev/xvdf1

/dev/xvdf1: Moved: 0.4%
/dev/xvdf1: Moved: 24.6%
/dev/xvdf1: Moved: 48.4%
/dev/xvdf1: Moved: 71.1%
/dev/xvdf1: Moved: 95.7%
/dev/xvdf1: Moved: 100.0%

We can now remove xvdf1 from our volume group:

[root@linuxacademy1 myvolume]# vgreduce battlestar /dev/xvdf1

Removed “/dev/xvdf1” from volume group “battlestar”

If you navigate to the mounted directory (/mnt/mymount) you can see that your files are still there.
Although the files were written on the xvdf1 disk, because we moved them off the initial group, they are
still available.

-4-
Extending Existing Logical Volumes Linux Academy

Extending Logical Volumes

We can also extend the galactica LVM we created earlier. To extend the volume by 5 GiB, run:

[root@linuxacademy1 myvolume]# lvextend -L 5G /dev/battlestar/galactica

Size of logical volume battlestar/galactica changed from 1.00 GiB (256 extents) to 5.00
GiB (1280 extents).
Logical volume galactica successfully resized.

Now if you perform df -h on your system, you can see that the system still has not read the changes we
have made. To fix this, we need to resize the file system:

[root@linuxacademy1 myvolume]# xfs_growfs /mnt/myvolume

meta-data=/dev/mapper/battlestar-galactica isize=256 agcount=4, agsize=65536 blks
= sectsz=512 attr=2, projid32bit=1
= crc=0 finobt=0
data = bsize=4096 blocks=262144, imaxpct=25
= sunit=0 swidth=0 blks
naming =version 2 bsize=4096 ascii-ci=0 ftype=0
log =internal bsize=4096 blocks=2560, version=2
= sectsz=512 sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none extsz=4096 blocks=0, rtextents=0
data blocks changed from 262144 to 1310720

Notice the use of the mount location and not the volume name.

Run df -h again to cofirm changes. You have completed this lab!

-5-