ISR Computing -

How to add new drive to Linux LVM

Let's say you had existing LVM configured. You also had only 2 partitions - root and swap, and now you ran out of space. You will need to extend your root partition.

Process:

Manually add physical drive to the system. Let it register.

List existing drives.

fdisk -l 

Create partition with the size equal to the physical hard disk size. Let's say we added 8GB drive, then we will need to format and create and format 8GB partition using fdisk utility. Keep in mind that you will need 8e - Linux LVM partition.

fdisk /dev/hdb 

Once formated, then we need to create Physical Volume out of it.

pvcreate /dev/hdb 

Verify creating of the physical volume

[root@rhel5 ~]# pvdisplay 
   --- Physical volume ---
   PV Name               /dev/hdb
   VG Name               VolGroup00
   PV Size               8.00 GB / not usable 32.00 MB
   Allocatable           yes (but full)
   PE Size (KByte)       32768
   Total PE              255
   Free PE               0
   Allocated PE          255
   PV UUID               2AsLK9-wAU1-bsHd-1eEZ-NqwU-Mzcf-QtAb3U
 

Now let's add our drive to the existing VolGroup00.

vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/hdb

Verify:

[root@rhel5 ~]# vgdisplay  

Extend LogVol00 by 8 GB

lvextend -L+8G /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 

Resize filesystem

resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 

Check disk space

df -ah