A physical disk is divided into one or more physical volumes, The Volume Groups are created by combining physical volumes. These volume groups are in turn subdivided into virtual disks called Logical Volumes. The logical volumes may be used just like regular disks with file system created on them and mounted in the Unix/Linux file system tree. The logical volumes can span multiple disks.

Benefits of Logical Volume Management

1. Logical volumes can be easily resized without any downtime or rebooting server.
2. LVM created in conjunction with RAID can provide fault tolerance coupled with scalability and easy disk management.

Drawback of Logical Volume Management

1. LVM cannot be used for the /boot because the boot loader can not read it. If you want to have the root / partition on a logical volume, you will need to create a separate /boot partition with normal ext3 file system type which is not a part of a volume group.
2. The physical volumes can’t be resized.

LVM Configuration

There are two way to configure LVM.

1) While installing fresh OS -
LVM can be configured during the graphical installation of Red Hat Linux You can use the utilities from the lvm package to create your LVM configuration. An overview of the steps required to configure LVM:

• Create physical volumes from the hard drives.
• Create volume groups from the physical volumes.
• Create logical volumes from the volume groups and assign the logical volumes mount points.

2) After OS reinstallation

One of our client want big size of /home partition with LVM support so I am considering /dev/sda7 on first HDD and /dea/sdb1 partition on secondary HDD, I want to combine both HDD space one partition as /home .

To create a LVM, follow following step process.

A. The first step in setting up LVM need to create these physical partitions properly with ‘Linux LVM’ – 0x8e so that they can be recognized by the LVM system. If we’re adding a physical partition. If it is normal ext3 partition please run fdisk command to change file system type and set it as as ‘Linux LVM’ – 0x8e’, you can follow the following steps

B.The first command pvcreate will “initialize a disk or partition for use by LVM”.

The above step creates a physical volume from 2 partitions which I want to initialize for inclusion in a volume group.

You can use following command to check various attributes of physical volume(s)

It will show result like this

C.The second command vgcreate create the Volume Group vg with a physical extent size (PE size) of 16M , The default extent size (4 MB) limits the volume to about 256 GB; a size of 1 TB would require extents of atleast 16 MB

You can use vgdisply command to display volume group information , It will show output like this

D.Now next step needs to create of one or more “logical volumes” using the volume group which you have created previous step. The following commands create a 50GB logical volume (LV) called lvol0 on volume group vg:

The above will create a softlink /dev/vg/lvol0 point to a correspondence block device file called /dev/mapper/vg-lvol0.

You can use lvdisplay command to check the information about a logical volume , It will show output look this

E.The Linux LVM configuration almost done , Now next step to format this logical volume lvol0 with a Linux supported file system, i.e. EXT2 , EXT3 file system etc.., You can use following command to format logical volumes with ext3 journalized ( -j =journaling support) file system .

F.Once it formatted use following command to mount the created file system

To confirm the LVM setup has been completed successfully, the df -h command should display the output same as below

Also do not forget to add the corresponding line in the /etc/fstab file:
#File: /etc/fstab