Extend LVM with new physical disk
LVM is a great tool for volume management. You can easily add a new (virtual) harddisk to a existing logical volume.
With fdisk -l you can see what devices are available. Choose the right one and execute:
fdisk /dev/sdb
Create a new partition which fills up all the free space with the type Linux LVM (HEX: 8e).
Then we create a physical volume for LVM:
lvm> pvcreate /dev/sdb1 Physical volume "/dev/sdb1" successfully created
After that we can extend the volume group with this new physical volume:
lvm> vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/sdb1 Volume group "VolGroup00" successfully extended
Then extend the existing logical volume with 100% of the free space from the new physical volume:
lvm> lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/VolGroup00/os Extending logical volume os to 27.84 GB Logical volume os successfully resized
That’s all, the existing logical volume is now extended with the new harddisk.
If you have a ext3 filesystem on this logical volume you can extend this online using the command:
[[email protected] ~]# resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/os resize2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006) Filesystem at /dev/VolGroup00/os is mounted on /; on-line resizing required Performing an on-line resize of /dev/VolGroup00/os to 7299072 (4k) blocks. The filesystem on /dev/VolGroup00/os is now 7299072 blocks long.
Like I said before, this can be done on a online root filesystem without any problems. I’ve done it again this time. But always make sure to have a backup!