On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 06:00 -0500, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 08:11 +0200, Christian Wahlgren wrote:
On 10/16/06, Shawn K. O'Shea shawn@ll.mit.edu wrote:
I did a RAID migration on a 3Ware 9590SE-12, so that an exported disk grew from 700GB to 1400GB. The exported disk is managed by LVM. The problem now is that I don't really know what to do now to let LVM and my locigal volume to make use of this new disk size, and probably future disk size growth.
I've been doing this recently with VMWare ESX server. To save space, I create base disk images of clean OS installs on a minimalistic sized disk. If I need space, I use tools from VMWare to make the virtual disk bigger, and then grow the bits inside Linux with LVM.
(...) (thanks for the links!)
To summarize the links...(usual caveats, backup data, etc, etc) -Create a new partition of type 8e (Linux LVM) on the new empty space.
-Add that pv to LVM If the new partition is /dev/sda3, then this would look like pvcreate /dev/sda3
This part is actually the main question I had (in the Subject) - each time I add a disk to my RAID-5 volume on the RAID card, the exported disk is getting bigger. And every time I do this I have to add a partition on this disk to use this new space. With primary partitions I can only repeat this 4 times.
So, is it the "proper way of doing this" when you grow this exported disk, to add partitions in a extended partition table each time you add a disk, and then add that PV partition to the VG, resize LVs etc? Compare to when you add a physical disk "directly" to a VG, you only create one partition on each new disk and then let your VG and LV to grow. This other situation with a RAID card you make one exported disk larger each time you add one or more physical disks to the RAID volume and then have to add a new partition on the same (emulated) disk (to the BIOS and operating system).
I have never tried this ... however, you can extend the size of a partition with fdisk by removing partition and starting it on exactly the same cylinder that it started before and ending at a larger cylinder. (Please test this on a partition that you can afford to lose :)
I don't know how (or if) that effects the pv size that was assigned that partition, but I do know that the file system stays the old size and needs to be extended if it is non pv.
Here is something else I see ... http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/96509133/m/839007490831
(that is not what I recommended, but something I found on google)
Just a note ... looks like pvresize can be used to extend the PV after the partition is extended.