[CentOS] replace x86 with x64 system and reuse existing LVM

[Lamar Owen]

On Sunday, January 09, 2011 05:31:25 pm Kai Schaetzl wrote:
> As I 
> understand once LVM gets loaded it should find the volumes by itself, but 
> will it be able to use the same naming scheme for instance? Or do I have 
> to do some additional stuff, anyway?

I've done this, and there are a couple of things I did to help make sure I didn't accidentally lose data.

First, boot into a rescue environment, or unmount the logical volume(s) on the volume group you want to reuse.  Deactivate the logical volume(s) on the volume group you want to reuse with vgchange -an VOLGROUP; then use vgexport VOLGROUP.  This will prevent the install from accidentally doing much of anything with that volumegroup.

Do the install, use the custom partitioning, and only set up and reformat the filesystems you don't want to keep.  In my own practice, I don't even set up the mount points for the filesystems that I do want to reuse at this point; I wait until the install is finished, I'll reboot the system, make sure everything is working, pull in updates, etc, and then I'll set up the mount points for /home and other filesystems I want to reuse.  

If you've done the vgexport, the new install won't activate the logical volumes automatically; use vgimport to register that volume group with the new install, and then use vgchange -ay to reactive the logical volumes.  You can then mount them where you want to, etc, and re-setup you Xen, etc.

This is just safe practice.  In my case, I was doing a C5 32-bit to C5 64-bit migration, with right at 16TB of backup data at the DR co-lo, and I really really really didn't want to have to spend the very long time necessary to re-mirror all that data over.  Better safe than sorry.

The vgexport/vgimport process is just a means of administratively marking the volume group as one being moved, and puts a brick wall of sorts that helps prevent accidental corruption/overwrites.  It can be used in a SAN environment to move volumes between hosts, too, and with the right SAN and the right HBA's can be done live with the hosts running.  Have done that one on EMC Clariion hardware; AccessLogix to do the host reassignment, and rescan_scsi_bus.sh to make the hosts pick up the new LUNs dynamically, while running.