Removing Physical Volumes from a Volume Group
To remove unused physical volumes from a volume group, use the vgreduce command. The vgreduce command shrinks a volume group’s capacity by removing one or more empty physical volumes. This frees those physical volumes to be used in different volume groups or to be removed from the system.
Before removing a physical volume from a volume group, you can make sure that the physical volume is not used by any logical volumes by using the pvdisplay command.
If the physical volume is still being used you will have to migrate the data to another physical volume using the pvmove command. Then use the vgreduce command to remove the physical volume:
The following command removes the physical volume /dev/hda1 from the volume group my_volume_group.
# vgreduce my_volume_group /dev/hda1
Creating Volume Groups
To create a volume group from one or more physical volumes, use the vgcreate command. The vgcreate command creates a new volume group by name and adds at least one physical volume to it.
The following command creates a volume group named vg1 that contains physical volumes /dev/sdd1 and /dev/sde1.
# vgcreate vg1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1
When physical volumes are used to create a volume group, its disk space is divided into 4MB extents, by default. This extent is the minimum amount by which the logical volume may be increased or decreased in size. Large numbers of extents will have no impact on I/O performance of the logical volume.
You can specify the extent size with the -s option to the vgcreate command if the default extent size is not suitable.
Preventing Allocation on a Physical Volume
You can prevent allocation of physical extents on the free space of one or more physical volumes with the pvchange command. This may be necessary if there are disk errors, or if you will be removing the physical volume.
The following command disallows the allocation of physical extents on /dev/sdk1.
# pvchange -x n /dev/sdk1
We can also use the -xy arguments of the pvchange command to allow allocation where it had previously been disallowed.
Growing a File System on a Logical Volume
To grow a file system on a logical volume, perform the following steps:
1. Make a new physical volume.
2. Extend the volume group that contains the logical volume with the file system you are growing to include the new physical volume.
3. Extend the logical volume to include the new physical volume.
4. Grow the file system.
*If you have sufficient unallocated space in the volume group, you can use that space to extend the logical volume instead of performing steps 1 and 2.
Logical Volume Backup
Metadata backups and archives are automatically created on every volume group and logical volume configuration change unless disabled in the lvm.conf file. By default, the metadata backup is stored in the /etc/lvm/backup file and the metadata archives are stored in the /etc/lvm/archive file.
How long the metadata archives stored in the /etc/lvm/archive file are kept and how many archive files are kept is determined by parameters you can set in the lvm.conf file. A daily system backup should include the contents of the /etc/lvm directory in the backup.
Note that a metadata backup does not back up the user and system data contained in the logical volumes. You can manually back up the metadata to the /etc/lvm/backup file with the vgcfgbackup command.
