I've created a real mess for my self.

I've got 5 hard drives which I've put 9 varying sized partitions on each. When I initially set things up I was allocating things between ASM and three LVM volume groups. The large amount of partitions was so I could move things around between ASM and different logical groups. Theory being I could isolate one group to one HD for backups, and I could de-allocate from LVM for ASM. Really bad idea.

For some reason the I failed to realized that since the ASM was running in a virtual machine (xen) I could allocate a LVM partition to the VT and ASM wouldn't know the difference. Also that I can pvmove any non-backup related logical volumes off a disk if needed.


So now, I've merged everything into one big volume group. I have a total of 30 pv volumes with free space and logical volumes scattered all over the place.

So my questions:

1. Is there an automatic defrag for lvm so I can put logical volumes together on the various disks?
2. Is there a way to move entire logical volume to a new disk rather than having to do it individually over the ~20 pv's that it's sitting on?

no defrag but you can use man 8 pvmove to move the LV's or LVs' PEs from a PV or PVs to a different PV

in it's simplest form pvmove --background /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb3 will move all allocated PEs from sda2|PV to sdb3|PV as long as sdb3|PV has enough free PEs to accomodate. (NOTE: I've always started the pvmove with --background and then checked status with a separate pvmove process with --interval and, while i do not perform this often, the 6-8 times initiated has completed successfully for me. YMMV)

yes, man 8 pvmove.
given, PVs sdc1, sdc5, sdd2, sdd3, sde6 contain all of PEs for LV named MikeyCarter and sdg8 has enough PEs available to entirely contain MikeyCarter LV one should (may need to check syntax|structure here...) be able to run the following (or similar):
if you just want to vacate a PV of all allocated PEs and let LVM move it to available PVs within the VG:

That's a great help thanks!