Sponsored Content
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Physical volume- no free physical partitions Post 302102157 by blowtorch on Monday 8th of January 2007 08:18:30 PM
Old 01-08-2007
Logical volume managers exist to ease disk space management. I will give you a brief overview of LVM so that you understand how it works and what is or isn't possible with it.

1. Basic Organisation
LVM consists of three main entities: disks (sometimes called physical volumes), disk groups (also called volume groups) and logical volumes.
Any number of disks (limited by implementation maximum values) can be collected to form volume groups. The volume groups can then be divided into logical volumes (again the minimum/maximum size and number of volumes is implementation dependent). A logical volume can exist on any physical volume(s) - this is hidden by the volume manager so that the filesystem sees and operates only on the logical volume (and applications in turn work only with the filesystem).

2. Advanced Organisation
A logical volume can be organised such that it occupies disks in one of several ways:
simple - a volume group consists of a single disk and multiple volumes exist on that disk. This is found on most home computers (akin to simple Windows partitions)
concatenation - a logical volume is larger than any single physical disk and is formed by concatenating multiple disks together. In this successive disks are used as the volume fills up.
striping - a volume may or may not be larger than a single disk, but is distributed over multiple disks to increase access speed. The distribution is in form of logical sectors being spread over multiple disks' phyiscal sectors.
mirroring - a logical volume is replicated within the volume group to prevent data loss due to loss of physical disks containing the logical volume. To achieve true mirroring, no sectors of the mirror volume should occupy any of the disks that are occupied by the volume being mirrored.

There is more, but probably would be better placed in the FAQ or Tutorials.

Now for your question:
Quote:
Originally Posted by markper
does UNIX automaticaly allocate space on the other physical volumes associated with this Volume Group? It sounds like the answer is yes, and when the last physical volume associated with the volume group filled up, then there is a problem.
Unix will not automatically allocate space on other physical volumes associated with the volume group. You can, however, extend the logical volume and the associated filesystem as the volume gets filled. About the last physical volume getting filled up, you can always extend the volume group itself by adding more physical volumes. This can be done to any extent (within the implementation limits).
Quote:
Originally Posted by markper
Lastly, when I extend the filesystem, do I need to shut down the processes running on the filesystem?
Usually the LVM (I have used HP-LVM and Veritas VM), comes with the utilities that extend the filesystem without any impact to the applications running within the filesystem. In HP-LVM, you can use fsadm and in VxVM, you can use vxresize.
 

10 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

physical volume and physical disk.

Hello, I need explanations about physical disks and physical volumes. What is the difference between these 2 things? In fact, i am trying to understand what the AIX lspv2command does. Thank you in advance. (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: VeroL
2 Replies

2. AIX

Basic Filesystem / Physical Volume / Logical Volume Check

Hi! Can anyone help me on how I can do a basic check on the Unix filesystems / physical volumes and logical volumes? What items should I check, like where do I look at in smit? Or are there commands that I should execute? I need to do this as I was informed by IBM that there seems to be... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: chipahoys
1 Replies

3. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

trying to devide existing physical volume

hi guys, i`m trying to take 40GB of my sda5 (/home mounted) to create new volume group(lvc) here`s the df output: /dev/sda2 7,9G 3,3G 4,3G 44% / udevfs 5,0M 60K 5,0M 2% /dev shmfs 379M 0 379M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 379M ... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: neverhood
2 Replies

4. AIX

Maximum Limit of HMC to handle Physical Power Virtualization Physical Machine

Hello All, Can anybody please tell me what is the maximum limit of Physical IBM Power Machine which can be handled by single HMC at a single point of time? Thanks, Jenish (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: jenish_shah
1 Replies

5. AIX

How to determine the physical volume fo the disks

This is the report I got running the comand rptconf, but I would like to know what is the capacity of the disks installed into our server power 6 with AIX System Model: IBM,7778-23X Machine Serial Number: 1066D5A Processor Type: PowerPC_POWER6 Processor Implementation Mode: POWER 6... (6 Replies)
Discussion started by: cucosss
6 Replies

6. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

importing a Physical Volume

hi guys I'm added a new disk to my server (virtual environment) It used to be a Volume Group=Vol_Group01 and Logical Volume= Log_Vol_01_Data and I see /dev/sdb Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/sdc: 133.1 GB, 133143986176 bytes 255 heads, 63... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: karlochacon
3 Replies

7. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Confusion Regarding Physical Volume,Volume Group,Logical Volume,Physical partition

Hi, I am new to unix. I am working on Red Hat Linux and side by side on AIX also. After reading the concepts of Storage, I am now really confused regarding the terminologies 1)Physical Volume 2)Volume Group 3)Logical Volume 4)Physical Partition Please help me to understand these concepts. (6 Replies)
Discussion started by: kashifsd17
6 Replies

8. Fedora

Need to incrwase PHYSICAL VOLUME space on hard drive with free space on it

Hi, I run Fedora 17. I created a physical volume of 30GB on a disk with 60GB of space so there is 30GB of free space. On the physical volume, I created my volume group and logical volumes. I assigned all the space in the physical volume to my volume group. I need to add the 30GB of free space... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: mojoman
1 Replies

9. AIX

Position of the logical volume on the physical volume

Hello everyone, I just read that while creating a logical volume(LV) we can choose the region of the physical volume (PV) in which the LV should be created. When I say region I mean: outer edge - outer middle - center - inner middle and inner edge. Can anyone help me understand the utility... (11 Replies)
Discussion started by: adilyos
11 Replies

10. Red Hat

Physical Volume Create Conundrum

I want to start by saying I already resolved my issue but I want to understand why I am seeing what I am seeing. I have a server with a RAID controller two 500GB drives and six 600GB drives. The two 500GB drives are mirrored and have the OS installed on them. The six 600GB they wanted set as... (4 Replies)
Discussion started by: scotbuff
4 Replies
PVDISPLAY(8)						      System Manager's Manual						      PVDISPLAY(8)

NAME
pvdisplay - display attributes of a physical volume SYNOPSIS
pvdisplay [-c|--colon] [-d|--debug] [-h|--help] [-s|--short] [-v[v]|--verbose [--verbose]] PhysicalVolumePath [PhysicalVolumePath...] DESCRIPTION
pvdisplay allows you to see the attributes of one or more physical volumes like size, physical extent size, space used for the volume group descriptor area and so on. OPTIONS -c, --colon Generate colon seperated output for easier parsing in scripts or programs. The values are: * physical volume device name * volume group name * physical volume size in kilobytes * internal physical volume number * physical volume status * physical volume (not) allocatable * current number of logical volumes on this physical volume * physical extent size in kilobytes * total number of physical extents * free number of physical extents * allocated number of physical extents -d, --debug Enables additional debugging output (if compiled with DEBUG). -h, --help Print a usage message on standard output and exit successfully. -s, --short Only display the size of the given physical volumes. -v, --verbose Display the mapping of physical extents to logical volumes and logical extents. -vv, --verbose --verbose Like -v with verbose runtime information about pvdisplay's activities. DIAGNOSTICS
pvdisplay returns an code state of 0 for success and > 0 for error: 1 no physical volume name on command line 2 error checking consistency of physical volume 3 error reading physical extent information from physical volume 95 driver/module not in kernel 96 invalid I/O protocol version 97 error locking logical volume manager 98 invalid lvmtab (run vgscan(8)) 99 invalid command line See also lvm(8), pvcreate(8), lvcreate(8), vgcreate(8) AUTHOR
Heinz Mauelshagen <Linux-LVM@Sistina.com> Heinz Mauelshagen LVM TOOLS PVDISPLAY(8)
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 04:11 PM.
Unix & Linux Forums Content Copyright 1993-2022. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy