A Quick Reference to Adding New Storage with LVM

This post walks through the process of adding storage capacity to a Linux server using LVM. There’s nothing new, revolutionary, or cutting-edge about this post—honestly, it’s really more for my own reference than anything else. Adding logical volumes is something that I do so infrequently that it’s hard to remember all the commands, so I’m recording them here for when I need them next time.

First, list the physical disks in the system (all commands should be prefaced with sudo or run as a user with the appropriate permissions):

fdisk -l

This will help you identify which (new) disk needs to be added. In my examples, I’ll use /dev/sdb.

Start partitioning the new disk (replace /dev/sdb with the appropriate values for your system):

fdisk /dev/sdb

I’m assuming that this isn’t a boot drive and that whatever logical volumes you create will take up the entire disk. Once you get into fdisk, follow these steps:

1. Enter n to create a new partition.
2. Enter p to make this a primary partition.
3. Enter 1 to make this the first partition on the disk.
4. Press enter twice to accept default start and end cylinders (unless you know you need to change them).
5. Enter t to change the partition type.
6. Enter 8e for the “Linux LVM” partition type.
7. Enter p to view the partition info so you can verify it is correct.
8. Assuming the information is correct, enter w to write the changes to the disk and exit fdisk.

Now, create a new physical volume (replace /dev/sdb1 with the correct value for your system):

pvcreate /dev/sdb1

These steps assume you need to create volume group to hold the new physical volume (use vgextend instead if you’re adding a physical volume to an existing volume group). This example assumes a volume group name of “hdd_vg”:

vgcreate hdd_vg /dev/sdb1

Now create a logical volume in the new volume group. This command creates a 200GB logical volume named “vmstore” in the volume group “hdd_vg”:

lvcreate -L 200G -n vmstore hdd_vg

Before you can use this new logical volume, you’ll need to format it (replace ext4 with your desired file system and replace /hdd_vg/vmstore with the correct volume group and logical volume names):

mkfs -t ext4 /dev/hdd_vg/vmstore

Use the blkid command to obtain the volume’s UUID for use in /etc/fstab:

blkid /dev/hdd_vg/vmstore

Make a mount point where this new logical volume will be mounted:

mkdir -p /mnt/vmstore

Edit /etc/fstab to specify the UUID of the new logical volume, the mount point, the file system, and other necessary information. Once you’re done, mount the new storage with mount -a. All done!

UPDATE: Reader Rutger van Esch pointed out that it’s not necessary to create the partition before creating the physical volume; you can actually create the physical volume directly on the block device using pvcreate /dev/sdb. This makes it easier to do online resizing later down the road. Thanks Rutger!

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