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Thursday, November 29, 2012

Adding Space to Linux LVM

After looking around at many different forums I have figured out how to properly add additional space to your VM.

In my situation I had a RHEL5 Virtual Machine running in VMware ESXi.  The machine had 50GB of space and we quickly ran out.

The first thing I did was go into the Settings for the VM using vSphere and resized the physical disk from 50GB to 256GB.

The next step was to reboot the Virtual Machine so that it would recognize the larger physical disk.  I rebooted the machine and the larger physical disk was apparent when typing the command,

#fdisk -l


Disk /dev/sda: 274.8 GB, 274877906944 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 33418 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
/dev/sda2              14        6527    52323705   8e  Linux LVM


Notice that although there are 33418 cylinders in my new 274.8 GB disk, that my second primary partition /dev/sda2 is only using cylinders 14-6527.  Resizing the Partition was not a safe option and I found many links showing users that had tried and failed.

The proper way to add space is to create an additional partition.  This can be done with fdisk.

#fdisk /dev/sda

Once you are in the fdisk utility you will want to create a new partition. 'n'
Specify this as a primary partition (1-4).  I chose 3 , as I already have 2 primary partitions.

You should notice that it will than ask you where to 'start'.  It should default to the 1st cylinder available (6528 in my case).  Press Enter.  Then 'end' should default to the last cylinder on the disk. (33418 in my case).  Press Enter.

Once the partition has been created you will need to change the partition ID to LVM.  The ID for a Linux LVM partition is 8e.  

Remember to press 'w' to write your fdisk changes to disk.  Once this is done reboot your VM.

Once the VM is back up you will want to run #vgdisplay to see your VolumeGroup name.



[root@ssdev ~]# vgdisplay
  /dev/hdc: open failed: No medium found
  --- Volume group ---
  VG Name               VolGroup00...


# pvcreate /dev/sda3
# vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/sda3

Next extend the LV:
[root@ssdev ~]# vgdisplay
  /dev/hdc: open failed: No medium found
  --- Volume group ---
  VG Name               VolGroup00
  System ID
  Format                lvm2
  Metadata Areas        2
  Metadata Sequence No  10
  VG Access             read/write
  VG Status             resizable
  MAX LV                0
  Cur LV                7
  Open LV               7
  Max PV                0
  Cur PV                2
  Act PV                2
  VG Size               255.84 GB
  PE Size               32.00 MB
  Total PE              8187
  Alloc PE / Size       1120 / 35.00 GB
  Free  PE / Size       7067 / 220.84 GB
  VG UUID               iF1177-sihW-YEb3-sLIj-AhVl-m6Fd-fMKQjg

[root@ssdev ~]# lvextend -L +220.84G /dev/VolGroup00/RootVol

In the last step i specified RootVol, as that is the volume i wanted resized ( / ).  lvdisplay will list the different volumes you have, and where they are mounted:

[root@ssdev ~]# lvdisplay
  /dev/hdc: open failed: No medium found
  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Name                /dev/VolGroup00/RootVol
  VG Name                VolGroup00
  LV UUID                N7lwvY-uqMg-2PfL-R4Ph-Dnh6-9hpu-a2vWeo
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Status              available
  # open                 1
  LV Size                4.00 GB
  Current LE             128
  Segments               1
  Allocation             inherit
  Read ahead sectors     auto
  - currently set to     256
  Block device           253:0


Last step, resize the filesystem on the LV you just extended:

[root@ssdev ~]# resize2fs -p /dev/VolGroup00/RootVol
resize2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
Filesystem at /dev/VolGroup00/RootVol is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
Performing an on-line resize of /dev/VolGroup00/RootVol to 58941440 (4k) blocks.

The filesystem on /dev/VolGroup00/RootVol is now 58941440 blocks long.

[root@ssdev ~]# df -m
Filesystem           1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-RootVol
                        223030      2322    209198   2% /
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-VarVol
                          2976       137      2686   5% /var
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-SrvVol
                         19839       855     17960   5% /srv
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-VarLogVol
                          3968       182      3582   5% /var/log
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-VarLogAuditVol
                           992        46       895   5% /var/log/audit
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-HomeVol
                          1984        68      1815   4% /home
/dev/sda1                   99         9        86   9% /boot
tmpfs                     1510         0      1510   0% /dev/shm
[root@ssdev ~]#

This step should take a while, you can see the disk I/O in vSphere: