Sistina Logical Volume Manager (LVM)

Advantage

Increase/decrease logical volumes (partitions) without worrying about the neiboring partitions

References

Sistina Logical Volume Manager (LVM)

Logical Volumes on Dell PowerEdge

How To on LVM

Sample Scenarios

Create 1TB partition /data

• display physical volume:

    pvscan

• display logical volume:

    lvscan

• create a new logical volume (1048675M) from a physical volume:

    lvcreate  -L1048675 -nLogVolData VolGroup_ID_724 /dev/sda5

• make logical volume a file system

    (reserve 1% for super user, default 5% is too big for this, still use default 4kb per inode):
    mke2fs -j -m 1 /dev/VolGroup_ID_724/LogVolData

• remove a logical volume (not part of the sequence, but in case you messed up)

    lvremove /dev/VolGroup_ID_724/LogVolData

• mount logical volume

mkdir /data
mount /dev/VolGroup_ID_724/LogVolData /data

• make it mount at boot time, edit /etc/fstab

   /dev/VolGroup_ID_724/LogVolData /data                auto    defaults        0 0

Extend /var partition on the fly (LVM2 and ext3 file system)

• Display Volume Group to see free space

     vgdisplay

• Extend Logical Volume by 2G

     lvextend -L+2G /dev/VolGroup_ID_724/LogVol7

• Resize file system to fill up the logical volume

     ext2online /dev/VolGroup_ID_724/LogVol7