This document is a continuation of LVM made easy, my previous blog

This document is on LVM2 and assuming your Linux distribution supports LVM2

This document also assumes you have LVM setup out of /dev/sdb

Volume group name is “mail-storage-group”

Logical volume name is “mail-storage-lv”

And we shall attempt to extend “mail-storage-lv” by adding a new disk

1. Initialize a new physical volume in the on the disk/partition as applicable
2. Add the physical disk to the existing volume group “mail-storage-group”, you want to expand
3. Expand the logical volume  “mail-storage-lv” receding  in the volume group “mail-storage-group”
4. Do online resizing of the partition

Initialize a new physical volume in the on the disk/partition as applicable

Lets add a new disk called /dev/sdc

First we need to mark this disk as a physical volume

[root@mail ~]#  pvcreate /dev/sdc

Physical volume “/dev/xvdc” successfully created

To show your physical volume information

[root@mail ~]# pvscan

and

[root@mail ~]# pvdisplay /dev/sdc

Add the physical disk to the existing volume group “mail-storage-group”

[root@mail ~]# vgextend mail-storage-group /dev/sdc

Volume group “mail-storage-group” successfully extended

Use the following commands to see a added disk place

[root@mail ~]# vgscan

[root@mail ~]# vgdisplay mail-storage-group

You are looking for something like this

Total PE              5118

  Alloc PE / Size       2559 / 10.00 GB

  Free  PE / Size       2559 / 10.00 GB

 

Expand the logical volume “mail-storage-lv” receding in the volume group “mail-storage-group”

[root@mail ~]# lvextend -l +100%FREE  /dev/mail-storage-group/mail-storage-lv

Extending logical volume mail-storage-lv to 19.99 GB

Logical volume mail-storage-lv successfully resized

This will use up 100% of the free space

You can verify your increase space now with running

[root@mail ~]# lvdisplay /dev/mail-storage-group/mail-storage-lv

— Logical volume —

  LV Name                /dev/mail-storage-group/mail-storage-lv

  .

.

  LV Size                19.99 GB

.

.

  Block device           253:2

So you can see the LVM side has been increase from 10GB to 20GB

Do online resizing of the partition

Fifrst chek the disk space

[root@ds1 ~]# df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00                      9.7G  1.4G  7.8G  16% /

/dev/xvda1             99M   30M   65M  32% /boottmpfs                 2.0G  4.0K  2.0G   1% /dev/shm

/dev/mapper/mail–storage–group-mail–storage–lv                      9.9G  151M  9.2G   2% /mnt

“/dev/mail-storage-group/mail-storage-lv” is now having more disk space then formatted for and its time ro resize the disk

the Linux 2.6 kernel supports on-line resize for filesystems mounted using ext3 only using

[root@ds1 ~]# resize2fs /dev/mail-storage-group/mail-storage-lv

resize2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)

Filesystem at /dev/mail-storage-group/mail-storage-lv is mounted on /mnt; on-line resizing required

Performing an on-line resize of /dev/mail-storage-group/mail-storage-lv to 5240832 (4k) blocks.

The filesystem on /dev/mail-storage-group/mail-storage-lv is now 5240832 blocks long.

[root@ds1 ~]# df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00                      9.7G  1.4G  7.8G  16% /

/dev/xvda1             99M   30M   65M  32% /boot

tmpfs                 2.0G  4.0K  2.0G   1% /dev/shm

/dev/mapper/mail–storage–group-mail–storage–lv      20G  156M   19G   1% /mnt

 

You can see it has been increased from 10 GB to 19 GB

Your extended space is ready to be used by your application