ken schrieb:

Hey, group,

I've got a system installed on a VMware VM. The SAN administrator allocated me more disk space from the (EMC) SAN and I need ultimately to create another partition to mount on the filesystem. Two (initial) questions about this:

Given with "VMware VM" you mean a virtual machine on an ESX(i) system and that the admin just increased the disk size for the VM, you will see the additional disk space using fdisk / cfdisk as unallocated space. Either increase your LVM or create a new partition.

What steps do I need to take prior to creating a new partition with fdisk? (The SAN space, BTW, is connected through VMware.)

The OS is already residing on a logical volume. Is there any compelling reason to bringing the new partition into lvm (aside from the ease of resizing it... something I don't anticipate us doing)? Or should I simply create an ext3 partition and mount that?

Depends much on the purpose of the additional space. Generally LVM makes it very easy to increase any of the existing LVMs / mountpoints.

Thanks much.

Alexander

If you are a good little doobie, check with your san admin to see if you need to change your starting block alignment. If he looks at you funny, take everything the man says to you with a grain of salt for the rest of your life.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_partition_align.pdf

Patrick

-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of ken Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 3:10 PM To: CentOS Mailing List Subject: [CentOS] adding SAN "diskspace" to CentOS system residing on VMware

Hey, group,

I've got a system installed on a VMware VM. The SAN administrator allocated me more disk space from the (EMC) SAN and I need ultimately to create another partition to mount on the filesystem. Two (initial) questions about this:

What steps do I need to take prior to creating a new partition with fdisk? (The SAN space, BTW, is connected through VMware.)

The OS is already residing on a logical volume. Is there any compelling reason to bringing the new partition into lvm (aside from the ease of resizing it... something I don't anticipate us doing)? Or should I simply create an ext3 partition and mount that?

Thanks much. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 2:10 PM, ken gebser@mousecar.com wrote: [snip]

The OS is already residing on a logical volume.  Is there any compelling reason to bringing the new partition into lvm (aside from the ease of resizing it... something I don't anticipate us doing)?  Or should I simply create an ext3 partition and mount that?

Using LVMs also gives you a lot of flexibility in moving volumes around. For example, you may later upgrade your SAN. If you have LVMs you can transparently mirror one SAN volume to another and then remove the original. You can do this with standard partitions, but the process requires some downtime.

LVMs can allow snapshots, which are quite useful in many situations.