Adding Additional Disk Space LVM

Adding Additional Disk Space

One big advantage of using LVM is that the size of a logical volume can be increased and logical volumes can be added to create additional mount points. To modify the LVM configuration post-installation, the lvm2 package needs to be installed.

To increase the size of an existing logical volume or to add a logical volume, you first need free disk space. This free disk space can either be disk space that already exists in the system as unpartitioned space (not part of an existing logical volume), an unused partition, physical volume that is not already a member of a logical volume, or disk space as a result of installing one or more additional hard drives to the system. The disk space can come from removing a logical volume to create space in the logical volume group, however, this is not common because if the LV already exists, it is most likely already being used and cannot be easily deleted without losing data.

After deciding which free disk space to use, the basic steps for increasing the size of a logical volume are as follows:

1. Create new physical volume from free disk space.
2. Add physical volume to the logical volume group.
3. Expand the size of the logical volume to include the newly added disk space in the volume group.
4. Expand the filesystem on the logical volume to include the new space.

To add a logical volume, use the following steps:

1. Create new physical volume from free disk space.
2. Add physical volume to the logical volume group.
3. Create a logical volume with the new space in volume group.
4. Create a filesystem on the logical volume.
5. Create a mount point.
6. Mount the logical volume.
7. Test the filesystem.
8. Add the new mount point to /etc/fstab.