Hi to all,

after goggling around and looking for in the linux Questions unsuccesfully, I'm here to ask you the way to extend the size of a LVM2 volume group over the remaining free space available on a physical volume.

My linux box is a Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 64bit, the 60GB hard disk has 2 win partition for about 19GB, a 1.5GB ext3 boot partition and finally a 36GB LVM partition (/dev/sda4) on which I created a volume group (volgrp) smaller 10GB than the 36GB physical volume (/dev/sda4).
What I want now is to extend the size of volume group up to the end of physical volume.

I tried to use the "vgextend volgrp /dev/sda4" but system answers me
with following output:

me@pc:~> sudo vgextend volgrp /dev/sda4
Physical volume '/dev/sda4' is already in volume group 'volgrp'
Unable to add physical volume '/dev/sda4' to volume group 'volgrp'.

Here the output of fdisk command:

me@pc:~> sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x5ea4f703

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 637 5116671 1b Hidden W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2 * 638 2465 14683410 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda3 2466 2596 1052257+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 2597 7296 37752750 8e Linux LVM

Should I use the pvmove command?

Thaks in advance for your help.

Are you saying that you used a pvcreate on sda4 that is less than the available size? If so, you could just use pvresize to expand it http://linux.die.net/man/8/pvresize. See also http://linux.die.net/man/8/vgchange.

Exactly what cmds did you use to create this?

OTOH, it may well be simpler to backup and re-create the pv/vg/lv. You should do a backup anyway before even trying to amend this.

Hi Chrism01,

I try to respond to your question posting you the output of these lvm commands:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo pvdisplay
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sda4
VG Name volgrp
PV Size 36.00 GB / not usable 3.73 MB
Allocatable yes
PE Size (KByte) 4096
Total PE 9216
Free PE 2560
Allocated PE 6656
PV UUID CWp5JY-X0VN-20WD-hTL9-u1mG-smT5-SAHTxX

So I'm quite sure that when I created the physical volume with pvcreate command (pvcreate /dev/sda4) I used for it the whole size of sda4 partition.

I also post you the output of vgdisplay:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo vgdisplay
--- Volume group ---
VG Name volgrp
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 11
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 7
Open LV 0
Max PV 0
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size 36.00 GB
PE Size 4.00 MB
Total PE 9216
Alloc PE / Size 6656 / 26.00 GB
Free PE / Size 2560 / 10.00 GB
VG UUID YS9zRl-I3Zx-yLdL-0VXI-h5pu-XlEl-YWWtkH

As you can see, the size of allocated PEs is 26.00 GB, instead the size of free PE is 10.00 GB.
What I want is to recover the 10GB free PE and to assign them finally to the volume group "volgrp".

Should I perhaps use the lvextend command?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions,

scrat75

Hi Chrism01,

with the following command I increased the logical volume "usr" size of 2GB.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo lvextend -L +2G /dev/volgrp/usr /dev/sda4
Extending logical volume usr to 8.00 GB
Logical volume usr successfully resized

I ran vgscan command and then vgdiplay:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo vgdisplay
--- Volume group ---
VG Name volgrp
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 12
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 7
Open LV 0
Max PV 0
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size 36.00 GB
PE Size 4.00 MB
Total PE 9216
Alloc PE / Size 7168 / 28.00 GB
Free PE / Size 2048 / 8.00 GB
VG UUID YS9zRl-I3Zx-yLdL-0VXI-h5pu-XlEl-YWWtkH

As you can see, now the free PE space is 8GB, before was 10GB.

Now I restart to see if all things are good..

Scrat75