LincolnBlogs

I had the occasion to need some extra filespace on the LVM’d root partition of a RHEL(or CentOS) vm. This is how to do it:

First off, VMWare allowed me to create a second HDD on the fly while the vm was running (YAY!)

Once that was done, I rooted into the server and:

# echo “- – -” > /sys/class/scsi_host/host#/scan
(partprobe should also do the trick ??)

# fdisk -l
(Just to see that the new disk is available – in this case /dev/sdb)

# fdisk /dev/sdb
(create a new partition here)

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

# vgs
(list the volume groups here)

# pvcreate /dev/sdb1
(add new physical volume)

# vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/sdb1
(extend my default volume group from the vgs command)

# vgs
(check to see pv and vg has another volume now)

# lvextend /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /dev/sdb1
(extend my / volume by the entire size of /dev/sdb1)

# resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
(resize filesystem to match vol size increase)
(requires a 2.6 kernel to resize while fs running)

That was it! And remember that all this was done on the fly, on the root partition and filesystem, WHILE the vm was running.