PowerVault

[agonizonai]

Hello,

I've currently added 10 extra SAS disks to an MD1220 array we have at work. While the OpenManage website reflects these changes (and Red Hat's disk utility), I can't seem to get Red Hat's LVM to SEE the changes.

Here's a brief rundown. The PERC 800 is listed in the Disk Utility (as being /dev/sda) and shows 17TB available (assigned to LVM2). However, when I go into Red Hat's LVM GUI, the vg only shows about 6.36TB available. I can't expand the group, as the changes aren't seen. I can't remove the LV from the VG, as it will erase the on the current disks (supposedly, and I can't take the chance that they're wrong).

So! I need to find a way to get LVM to SEE that /dev/sda is now larger than it once was (i.e. 17TB, and not just 6TB). I can't seem to find any commands for LVM that are akin to "update my vg with new information from the disk associated with it".

Any help, insight, and/or wisdom would be greatly appreciated!

David

[DELL-Jonathan S · Accepted solution]

Hi David,

What do you see when you run this command: "pvdisplay"?

Hopefully you will see your physical volume /dev/sda with the old PV Size of 6TB and /dev/sda is listed as Allocatable (not reporting as full).

If so, you should then be able to run "pvresize /dev/sda", or if it is actually a specific partition such as /dev/sda1, you'll need to run it on that one: "pvresize /dev/sda1". The default behavior of pvresize is to non-destructively grow the physical volume to fill the physical volume. Once you do that I think you'll be able to work with it in LVM at the full size.

Let me know if you have any questions and how it works out. If you want to paste the output of "pvdisplay" first then we can take a look at it before you do the resize.

[agonizonai]

Hi Jonathan, I had a breakthrough this morning. Just to recap, at the time the "pvdisplay" command was showing that /dev/sda only had 6.36TB to it. I don't recall whether or not it showed additional extents being allocatable.

What ended up saving me was doing a "vgdisplay" which showed the vgsize as being about 15TB and the free physical extens of about 9.09TB. After that I did a "vgscan" which updated the space that I could extend into (from within the context of the LVM-GUI).

From the looks of what you're suggesting, I'm quite sure you would have led me to the end result. I had just been ruminating on this all weekend and finally had some non-invasive things to try. My biggest concern was losing any data (because, at the time I posted this I was convinced I'd have to destroy the PV just to get LVM to SEE the additional space). Thankfully, that didn't happen!

Thanks for the response!

David