Hands-on Lab

Add and Remove

Volumes, Partition
Disks, and Work with
LVM
Contents
Add Partitions 1

Create the Physical Volumes, Volume Group, and Logical Volume 3

Remove the Logical Volume 5

Review 6
Add and Remove Volumes, Partition Disks, and Work with LVM Linux Academy + Cloud Assessments

In this lab, we use Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and gdisk to take two disks, partition them,
and combine them into a single volume group. From here, we want to create a logical volume
for use as log storage. When finished, we review how to remove logical and physical volumes,
as well as volume groups.

Add Partitions
Log in to the lab using the credentials provided on the Hands-on Lab page. Switch to the root
user (sudo su -).

Two additional devices have been added to this lab for use with LVM. To see what these devices
are called, run:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]# ls /dev/xvd*

/dev/xvdf and /dev/xvdj are the two additional disks.

Check to see if gdisk is installed:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]# gdisk

-bash: gdisk: command not found

Since it is not, we need to install it before we can continue:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]# yum install gdisk

Now we can use gdisk to partition and format one of our provided drives. We’ll start with /dev/
xvdf:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]# gdisk /dev/xvdf

This drops us into the gdisk configuration prompt, wherein we’ll be asked to specify the settings
we want to use for our disk. In this instance, we want to create a new partition, set the partition
number to 1, partition the entire provided device, set the file system type to LVM (8e00), and
write the changes to the disk. Many of these settings are the default.

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.10

Partition table scan:

MBR: not present
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: not present
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Add and Remove Volumes, Partition Disks, and Work with LVM Linux Academy + Cloud Assessments

Creating new GPT entries.

Command (? for help): n

Partition number (1-128, default 1):
First sector (34-41943006, default = 2048) or {+-}size{KMGTP}:
Last sector (2048-41943006, default = 41943006) or {+-}
size{KMGTP}:
Current type is 'Linux filesystem'
Hex code or GUID (L to show codes, Enter = 8300): 8e00
Changed type of partition to 'Linux LVM'

Command (? for help): w

Final checks complete. About to write GPT data. THIS WILL

OVERWRITE EXISTING
PARTITIONS!!

Do you want to proceed? (Y/N): y

OK; writing new GUID partition table (GPT) to /dev/xvdf.
The operation has completed successfully.

We can now partition our second device. We again want to do this with gdisk:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]# gdisk /dev/xvdj

As before, we want to create a new partition using the defaults for partition number, first sector,
and last section. We also want to continue using the Linux file system for our file system type.
Write the changes and proceed:

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.10

Partition table scan:

MBR: not present
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: not present

Creating new GPT entries.

Command (? for help): n

Partition number (1-128, default 1):
First sector (34-41943006, default = 2048) or {+-}size{KMGTP}:
Last sector (2048-41943006, default = 41943006) or {+-}
size{KMGTP}:
Current type is 'Linux filesystem'
Hex code or GUID (L to show codes, Enter = 8300): 8e00
Changed type of partition to 'Linux LVM'

Command (? for help): w

Final checks complete. About to write GPT data. THIS WILL

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Add and Remove Volumes, Partition Disks, and Work with LVM Linux Academy + Cloud Assessments

OVERWRITE EXISTING
PARTITIONS!!

Do you want to proceed? (Y/N): y

OK; writing new GUID partition table (GPT) to /dev/xvdj.
The operation has completed successfully.

Create the Physical Volumes, Volume Group,

and Logical Volume
Prepare the partitions by initializing them as a physical volume using the pvcreate command:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]#pvcreate /dev/xvdf1 /dev/xvdj1

Physical volume "/dev/xvdf1" successfully created
Physical volume "/dev/xvdj1" successfully created

Confirm that the volumes have been created, and review their settings:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]#pvdisplay
"/dev/xvdf1" is a new physical volume of "20.00 GiB"
--- NEW Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/xvdf1
VG Name
PV Size 20.00 GiB
Allocatable NO
PE Size 0
Total PE 0
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 0
PV UUID k8gf50-dtIT-29Yp-RMPd-eH6E-x2J3-LyQJnx

"/dev/xvdj1" is a new physical volume of "20.00 GiB"

--- NEW Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/xvdj1
VG Name
PV Size 20.00 GiB
Allocatable NO
PE Size 0
Total PE 0
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 0
PV UUID b5hihP-7m5K-x5v5-9ICx-wn3x-QNIx-MUFmox

Here we can see that both 20 GB volumes, /dev/xvdf1 and /dev/xvdj1 are available as
physical volumes for LVM to use.

We can now create our volume group, comprised of both physical volumes. We called our

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Add and Remove Volumes, Partition Disks, and Work with LVM Linux Academy + Cloud Assessments

volume group log_vg:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]#vgcreate log_vg /dev/xvdf1 /dev/xvdj1

Volume group "log_vg" successfully created

Review the volume group:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]#vgdisplay
--- Volume group ---
VG Name log_vg
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 2
Metadata Sequence No 1
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 0
Open LV 0
Max PV 0
Cur PV 2
Act PV 2
VG Size 39.99 GiB
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 10238
Alloc PE / Size 0 / 0
Free PE / Size 10238 / 39.99 GiB
VG UUID x8X7D6-RIHL-Oot9-1asA-UZ1Z-X4rA-NssgU1

Notice that the size of our volume group is about 40 GB – a combination of the two 20 GB
volumes we included in the group.

Now we can create our logical volume from this volume group. To do this, we use the lvcreate
command:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]#lvcreate -n log_lv -L 10GB log_vg

Logical volume "log_lv" created.

The -n flag denotes that we’re naming the logical volume log_lv, while the -L flag sets the
volume size – in this case, 10 GB. log_vg references back to the volume group we are working
from.

Review the newly-created logical volume:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]#lvdisplay
--- Logical volume ---
LV Path /dev/log_vg/log_lv
LV Name log_lv
VG Name log_vg
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Add and Remove Volumes, Partition Disks, and Work with LVM Linux Academy + Cloud Assessments

LV UUID WYTPo1-6Gk9-lgxh-Q8Rl-PhpW-INGI-PMmHBM
LV Write Access read/write
LV Creation host, time LinuxAcademy, 2017-12-14 10:37:38 -0500
LV Status available
# open 0
LV Size 10.00 GiB
Current LE 2560
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 256
Block device 253:0

From here, we can see our logical volume’s path (/dev/log_vg/log_lv), as well as general
information about the logical volume itself, including name, size, write access, creation host,
and more. Copy the LV path.

We now need to format our volume to work as an ext4 file system:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]# mkfs -t ext4 /dev/log_vg/log_lv

Create a mount point for the file system:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]# mkdir /mnt/log_files

Finally, mount the file system:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]# mount /dev/log_vg/log_lv /mnt/log_files/

Confirm that the file system mounted successfully:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]#
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvde1 5.8G 1.5G 4.1G 26% /
tmpfs 270M 0 270M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/log_vg-log_lv
9.9G 151M 9.2G 2% /mnt/log_files

Remove the Logical Volume

Now that we know how to create and mount logical volumes, we also need to review how to
remove them. To do this, we can remove the volume group:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]#vgremove log_vg

Do you really want to remove volume group "log_vg" containing 1
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Add and Remove Volumes, Partition Disks, and Work with LVM Linux Academy + Cloud Assessments

logical volumes? [y/n]: y

Logical volume log_vg/log_lv contains a filesystem in use.

However, this fails, outputting the error Logical volume log_vg/log_lv contains a
filesystem in use.. This is because our file system is still mounted. Unmount the file system:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]# umount /mnt/log_files/

We also need to remove the logical volume:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]#lvremove /dev/log_vg/log_lv

Do you really want to remove active logical volume log_lv? [y/n]:
y
Logical volume "log_lv" successfully removed

Finally, we can rerun the vgremove command to remove the volume group:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]#vgremove log_vg

Volume group "log_vg" successfully removed

Confirm the removal of the volume with the vgdisplay command:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]# vgdisplay

Although we’ve removed the volume group, we do still have the two physical volumes left over.
We can remove these, too, using the pvremove command:

[root@LinuxAcademy ~]#pvremove /dev/xvdf1 /dev/xvdj1

Labels on physical volume "/dev/xvdf1" successfully wiped
Labels on physical volume "/dev/xvdj1" successfully wiped

Review
We have now walked through the process of setting up physical volumes, volume groups, and
logical volumes using a series of Logical Volume Manager commands, as well as how to remove
these volumes and groups when finished with them. With LVM, we can merge physical disks
into single volumes, easily resize our devices, and —if needed— manage large farms of disks.

This lab is now complete!

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