Working with logical volumes (part 1)

2017-11-02 1089 words 6 minutes

Contents

Part one of working with logical volumes will cover the basic’s involved in creating logical volumes.

TL;DR

For those of you who just want the order of the commands.

sudo pvcreate </path/to/device>
sudo vgcreate <vgname> </path/to/device>
sudo lvcreate -n <lvname> -L <size> <vgname>
sudo mkfs.<filesystem> </path/to/lv>

What you need to follow this guide

A free disk (I used an empty virtual machine disk)
Any Linux distribution (In this example I’ll be using Fedora 26, but the commands are the same across the entire Linux spectrum)
LVM packages (lvm2 - usually pre-installed)

What is LVM?

Logical Volume Management (LVM ) offers a way to abstract a disk, multiple disks, or disk partitions into one logical volume. LVM file systems can be rearranged, resized, moved, removed, created, and deleted on the fly. They offer incredible flexibility when setting up a new system or when rethinking the storage layout of an existing system.

Logical Volume Management filesystems are made up of 4 major parts

The physical device (physical volume)

This is the storage device or devices that will make up the volume group.

The Volume Group

The volume group is essentially a disk or a group of physical devices that have been separated into a group. The Volume Group is just a pool of disks. It can contain just one disk (or partition), or many disks.
The volume group is a logical volume made up of physical volumes

The Logical Volume

The logical volume is some portion of the volume group that will be dedicated to a particular filesystem. One volume group can have many live volumes.

The filesystem
- After you create a Live Volume you must format it into one of the many Linux filesystems. Most likely ext4 or xfs .

Here is what you should remember if you are new to LVM

Physical Volumes (the raw storage), make up Logical Volume Groups.
Volume Groups are a logical representation of physical devices.
Volume Groups contain Live Volumes which are formatted as filesystems.
Filesystems are responsible for storing your data.

Create a new Volume

Step one - identify your storage device

We can identify our storage devices using the fdisk command

sudo fdisk -l
    Disk /dev/sda: 30 GiB, 32212254720 bytes, 62914560 sectors
    Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
    Disklabel type: gpt
    Disk identifier: 0E3D261B-275C-49D0-8C9A-427B5CEEAD4F

    Device       Start      End  Sectors  Size Type
    /dev/sda1     2048   411647   409600  200M EFI System
    /dev/sda2   411648  2508799  2097152    1G Linux filesystem
    /dev/sda3  2508800 62912511 60403712 28.8G Linux LVM


    Disk /dev/sdb: 10 GiB, 10737418240 bytes, 20971520 sectors
    Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


    Disk /dev/mapper/fedora-root: 25.8 GiB, 27703377920 bytes, 54108160 sectors
    Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


    Disk /dev/mapper/fedora-swap: 3 GiB, 3221225472 bytes, 6291456 sectors
    Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

The device I want is shown as Disk /dev/sdb 10GiB

Step two - create the physical volume

Use the pvcreate command to create the new physical volume.

sudo pvcreate /dev/sdb
  Physical volume "/dev/sdb" successfully created.

Step three - create the volume group

The vgcreate command, creates a new volume group

sudo vgcreate vgtest /dev/sdb
  Volume group "vgtest" successfully created

Step four - create a logical volume

sudo lvcreate -n testlv -L 2G vgtest
  Logical volume "testlv" created.

Maybe another one

sudo lvcreate -n omg_testlv -L 2G vgtest
  Logical volume "omg_testlv" created.

lvcreate takes several arguments. You must specify a name, a size, and the volume group to attach it to.

Step five - make the filesystems

I’m formatting my file systems as xfs in this case.

Start with testlv

sudo mkfs.xfs /dev/mapper/vgtest-testlv
    meta-data=/dev/mapper/vgtest-testlv isize=512    agcount=4, agsize=131072 blks
             =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
             =                       crc=1        finobt=1, sparse=0, rmapbt=0, reflink=0
    data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=524288, imaxpct=25
             =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
    naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0 ftype=1
    log      =internal log           bsize=4096   blocks=2560, version=2
             =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
    realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0

<br /r>

Then omg_testlv

sudo mkfs.xfs /dev/mapper/vgtest-omg_testlv
    meta-data=/dev/mapper/vgtest-omg_testlv isize=512    agcount=4, agsize=131072 blks
             =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
             =                       crc=1        finobt=1, sparse=0, rmapbt=0, reflink=0
    data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=524288, imaxpct=25
             =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
    naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0 ftype=1
    log      =internal log           bsize=4096   blocks=2560, version=2
             =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
    realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0

Step 3 - add the new filesystems to your fstab

Make a couple directories as mount points.

sudo mkdir /testlv
sudo mkdir /omgtestlv

Edit the /etc/fstab file and append the following.

/dev/mapper/vgtest-testlv /testlv               xfs     defaults        0 0
/dev/mapper/vgtest-omg_testlv /omgtestlv        xfs     defaults        0 0

Mount the filesystems

sudo mount -a

How do I know that this did something?

Check your file system mounts with df

df -hT
    Filesystem                    Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    devtmpfs                      devtmpfs  938M     0  938M   0% /dev
    tmpfs                         tmpfs     950M     0  950M   0% /dev/shm
    tmpfs                         tmpfs     950M  2.4M  948M   1% /run
    tmpfs                         tmpfs     950M     0  950M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
    /dev/mapper/fedora-root       ext4       26G  5.6G   19G  24% /
    tmpfs                         tmpfs     950M   28K  950M   1% /tmp
    /dev/sda2                     ext4      976M  109M  800M  12% /boot
    /dev/sda1                     vfat      200M  9.5M  191M   5% /boot/efi
    tmpfs                         tmpfs     190M   24K  190M   1% /run/user/42
    tmpfs                         tmpfs     190M   40K  190M   1% /run/user/1000
    /dev/mapper/vgtest-testlv     xfs       2.0G   35M  2.0G   2% /testlv
    /dev/mapper/vgtest-omg_testlv xfs       2.0G   35M  2.0G   2% /omgtestlv

Notice our new volumes in the output of df .

Verify the Logical Volume with lvdisplay

sudo lvdisplay
      --- Logical volume ---
      LV Path                /dev/vgtest/testlv
      LV Name                testlv
      VG Name                vgtest
      LV UUID                zw2JB7-gmmZ-4llC-FLf1-jJhE-B82R-Xz4Cxc
      LV Write Access        read/write
      LV Creation host, time fedora01, 2017-11-01 21:24:33 -0400
      LV Status              available
      # open                 1
      LV Size                2.00 GiB
      Current LE             512
      Segments               1
      Allocation             inherit
      Read ahead sectors     auto
      - currently set to     256
      Block device           253:2

      --- Logical volume ---
      LV Path                /dev/vgtest/omg_testlv
      LV Name                omg_testlv
      VG Name                vgtest
      LV UUID                h6eLKT-Aq5u-UXem-dgtA-OIXs-z901-lNRhNp
      LV Write Access        read/write
      LV Creation host, time fedora01, 2017-11-01 21:25:28 -0400
      LV Status              available
      # open                 1
      LV Size                2.00 GiB
      Current LE             512
      Segments               1
      Allocation             inherit
      Read ahead sectors     auto
      - currently set to     256
      Block device           253:3

If you are going to be working with LVM on a regular basis you will want to familiarize yourself with the following commands:

vgdisplay , vgscan , pvdisplay , pvscan , lvdisplay , lvscan

Helpful Links:

CentOS LVM Docs

Ubuntu LVM Docs