[CentOS] Looking for a life-save LVM Guru

Sun Mar 1 01:40:51 UTC 2015
Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com>

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 5:59 PM, James A. Peltier <jpeltier at sfu.ca> wrote:
> There is no difference between a single disk system and a multi-disk system in terms of being able to dynamically resize volumes that reside on a volume group.  Having the ability to resize a volume to be either larger or smaller on demand is a really nice feature to have.

I'll better qualify this. For CentOS it's a fine default, as it is for
Fedora Server. For Workstation and Cloud I think LVM overly
complicates things. More non-enterprise users get confused over LVM
than they ever have a need to resize volumes.

>  Did you make / too small and have space on home and you're using ext3/4 then simply resize the home logical volume to be smaller and all the free extents to /.  Pretty simple process really and it can be done online.

XFS doesn't support shrink, only grow. XFS is the CentOS 7 default.
The main advantage of LVM for CentOS system disks is ability to use
pvmove to replace a drive online, rather than resize. If Btrfs
stabilizes sufficiently for RHEL/CentOS 8, overall it's a win because
it meets the simple need of mortal users and supports advanced
features for advanced users. (Ergo I think LVM is badass but it's also
the storage equivalent of emacs - managing it is completely crazy.)

>This is just one example.  There are others, but this has nothing to do with the OP.
>
> Getting back to the OP, it would seem that you may be stuck in a position where you need to restore from backup.  Without having further details into what exactly is happening I fear you're not going to be able to recover.  I'd be available to talk off list if needed.

Yeah my bad for partly derailing this thread. Hopefully the original
poster hasn't been scared off, not least of which may be due to my
bark about cross posting being worse than my bite.

-- 
Chris Murphy