Installation guide
Table Of Contents
- LVM Administrator's Guide
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. The LVM Logical Volume Manager
- Chapter 2. LVM Components
- Chapter 3. LVM Administration Overview
- Chapter 4. LVM Administration with CLI Commands
- 1. Using CLI Commands
- 2. Physical Volume Administration
- 3. Volume Group Administration
- 3.1. Creating Volume Groups
- 3.2. Adding Physical Volumes to a Volume Group
- 3.3. Displaying Volume Groups
- 3.4. Scanning Disks for Volume Groups to Build the Cache File
- 3.5. Removing Physical Volumes from a Volume Group
- 3.6. Changing the Parameters of a Volume Group
- 3.7. Activating and Deactivating Volume Groups
- 3.8. Removing Volume Groups
- 3.9. Splitting a Volume Group
- 3.10. Combining Volume Groups
- 3.11. Backing Up Volume Group Metadata
- 3.12. Renaming a Volume Group
- 3.13. Moving a Volume Group to Another System
- 3.14. Recreating a Volume Group Directory
- 4. Logical Volume Administration
- 4.1. Creating Logical Volumes
- 4.2. Persistent Device Numbers
- 4.3. Resizing Logical Volumes
- 4.4. Changing the Parameters of a Logical Volume Group
- 4.5. Renaming Logical Volumes
- 4.6. Removing Logical Volumes
- 4.7. Displaying Logical Volumes
- 4.8. Growing Logical Volumes
- 4.9. Extending a Striped Volume
- 4.10. Shrinking Logical Volumes
- 5. Creating Snapshot Volumes
- 6. Controlling LVM Device Scans with Filters
- 7. Online Data Relocation
- 8. Activating Logical Volumes on Individual Nodes in a Cluster
- 9. Customized Reporting for LVM
- Chapter 5. LVM Configuration Examples
- Chapter 6. LVM Troubleshooting
- Chapter 7. LVM Administration with the LVM GUI
- Appendix A. The Device Mapper
- Appendix B. The LVM Configuration Files
- Appendix C. LVM Object Tags
- Appendix D. LVM Volume Group Metadata
- Index

copies of the file system: a linear logical volume plus one copy. Similarly, specifying -m2 creates
two mirrors, yielding three copies of the file system.
The following command creates a mirrored logical volume with a single mirror. The volume is 50
gigabytes in size, is named mirrorlv, and is carved out of volume group vg0:
lvcreate -L 50G -m1 -n gfslv vg0
An LVM mirror divides the device being copied into regions that, by default, are 512KB in size.
You can use the -R argument to specify the region size in MB. LVM maintains a small log which
it uses to keep track of which regions are in sync with the mirror or mirrors. By default, this log is
kept on disk, which keeps it persistent across reboots. You can specify instead that this log be
kept in memory with the --corelog argument; this eliminates the need for an extra log device,
but it requires that the entire mirror be resynchronized at every reboot.
The following command creates a mirrored logical volume from the volume group bigvg. The lo-
gical is named ondiskmirvol and has a single mirror. The volume is 12MB in size and keeps the
mirror log in memory.
# lvcreate -L 12MB -m1 --corelog -n ondiskmirvol bigvg
Logical volume "ondiskmirvol" created
When a mirror is created, the mirror regions are synchronized. For large mirror components, the
sync process may take a long time. When you are creating a new mirror that does not need to
be revived, you can specify the nosync argument to indicate that an initial synchronization from
the first device is not required.
You can specify which devices to use for the mirror logs and log, and which extents of the
devices to use. To force the log onto a particular disk, specify exactly one extent on the disk on
which it will be placed. LVM does not necessary respect the order in which devices are listed in
the command line. If any physical volumes are listed that is the only space on which allocation
will take place. Any physical extents included in the list that are already allocated will get ig-
nored.
The following command creates a mirrored logical volume with a single mirror. The volume is
500 megabytes in size, it is named mirrorlv, and it is carved out of volume group vg0. The first
leg of the mirror is on device /dev/sda1, the second leg of the mirror is on device /dev/sdb1, and
the mirror log is on /dev/sdc1.
lvcreate -L 500M -m1 -n mirrorlv vg0 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
The following command creates a mirrored logical volume with a single mirror. The volume is
500 megabytes in size, it is named mirrorlv, and it is carved out of volume group vg0. The first
leg of the mirror is on extents 0 through 499 of device /dev/sda1, the second leg of the mirror is
on extents 0 through 499 of device /dev/sdb1, and the mirror log starts on extent 0 of device /
dev/sdc1. These are 1MB extents. If any of the specified extents have already been allocated,
they will be ignored.
lvcreate -L 500M -m1 -n mirrorlv vg0 /dev/sda1:0-499 /dev/sdb1:0-499 /dev/sdc1:0
4.1. Creating Logical Volumes
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