----- Original Message ----- | On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 12:24 AM, James A. Peltier jpeltier@sfu.ca | wrote: | > The choice is yours. I use whole disk PVs myself. | | Indeed I did originally use whole-disk PVs. But Anaconda doesn't | support them so during a recent rebuild we went to partitions. I'm | prepared to blame anaconda for that to an extent. | | But I also want to know a tangible reason why the kernel can't rescan | partitions as it can block device sizes.
partprobe can rescan partitions, but it can't resize them. You may be able to use gparted or the parted text mode to resize partitions online. The statement that anaconda can't is not really true. Through kickstart you can do pretty much anything you can script. You could use a prescript or postscript in kickstart to setup the partition layout and what not.
If you have a clear separation of the OS disk from the data disks then it's a simple post script to create the data disk as a full disk PVs.