Lesson 3.61: Growing a volume with LVM

Disks fill up, and on a server you want to add space without moving data or stopping the service. LVM (Logical Volume Manager) puts a layer between disks and file systems: disks become physical volumes, they are pooled into a volume group, and logical volumes are cut from the pool. Adding a disk to the pool and growing a volume and its file system takes three commands, while the file system stays mounted. In the lab /srv/data is full; you read the LVM layout, add a new 10 GB disk to the pool, grow the volume and the ext4 file system online, and keep some space free on purpose.

16 min

You will learn to

Explain physical volumes, volume groups and logical volumes
Read pvs, vgs and lvs
Add a disk to a volume group
Grow a logical volume and its file system online
Keep free space in the pool for later

Key terms

Physical volume (PV): A disk or partition prepared for LVM with pvcreate.
Volume group (VG): A pool made of one or more physical volumes.
Logical volume (LV): A block device cut from a volume group; it holds a file system.
Extent: The unit LVM allocates in, 4 MiB by default.
Online resize: Growing a mounted file system without unmounting it.

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