Question: how to find the disk where the Linux’s root(/) is on in Bash? The root may be on a LVM volume or on a raw disk. 2 cases: One example: # df -hT | grep /$ /dev/sda4 ext4 48G 32G 14G 71% / For another example: # df -hT | grep /$ /dev/mapper/fedora-root ext4…
How to attach and mount Xen DomU’s disk partitions on Linux without Xen? You can use kpartx to create devices from the VM disk image (say, ./vmdisk0). To activate all the partitions in a raw VM disk image: # kpartx -av ./vmdisk0 This will output lines such as: add map loop1p1 (253:8): 0 497664 linear…
How to deactivate a LVM logical volume activated by #vgchange -aay on Linux You may need to make a LVM volume group inactive and thus unknown to the kernel. To deactivate a volume group, use the -a (–activate) argument of the vgchange command. To deactivates the volume group vg, use this command # vgchange -a…
On Fedora, after inserting/plugging in an exteranl hard disk with LVM partitions on it, the partitions will appear under /dev like /dev/lvm-group/lvm-partition. However, on CentOS 6, the LVM volumes do not appear automatically. How to mount LVM partitions from an external hard disk on CentOS? What you need on CentOS is to activate the LVM…
How to make fdisk -l display partition sizes by bytes instead of sectors? fdisk does not have such options as far as I know. However, good news is that you can use parted: # parted -l It will print partition info like # parted -l Model: Linux device-mapper (linear) (dm) Disk /dev/mapper/fedora_vm235-swap: 2164MB Sector size…
How to find which hard drives a LVM volume uses to decide which volume will be affected if a disk failes. You can use lvdisplay with the –maps option to display the the mapping of logical extents to physical volumes and physical extents: # lvdisplay –maps To map physical extents to logical extents, use #…
libvirt uses files for VM images by default under /var/lib/libvirt/images/. LVM is a convenient tool for managing VM images. How to use LVM groups with libvirt? This post discusses the method to add LVM groups as a storage pool for libvirt: http://ailoo.net/2011/02/use-a-lvm-volume-group-with-libvirt/ For a general introduction of the storage management in libvirt, please check: http://libvirt.org/storage.html
This is the scenario: I want to remove a old hard disk which is a LVM PV and contains data. There is free space available on other PVs in the VG. It should move the data from the disk to be removed to other PVs and then remove the disk. The process to remove sdb…
Any tutorials or tips on how to manage LVM? LVM provides a flexible and easy way to management storage disks on Linux. It also provides a set of tools for management. Here are some tutorials and references for managing LVM: LVM man pages: https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-lvm/#lbAL Manage Disk Volume in Linux: http://www.hongkedavid.com/blog/disk_volume.html LVM with Xen: https://www.systutorials.com/b/linux/tag/lvm/ Remove missing phyiscal volumes…
In Extending a Mounted Ext4 File System on LVM in Linux, we introduced how to extend a mounted ext4 filesystem on LVM Logical volume by adding a new physical volume. It is also common to shrink an ext4 file system as to spare some disk space. In this post, I will discuss how to shrink…
The Linux kernel has a generic driver for a graphic framebuffer named vesafb on intel boxes. It provides a nice large console for most of modern displays. Setting VESA modes for Linux kernel with 32-bit and 16-bit boot protocol are different. We introduce both methods here. Linux kernel with 32-bit boot protocol For machine with…
LVM is a great tool to manage hard disks on Linux—you can abstract the hard drives away and manage logical volumes from volume groups, you can dynamically add or remove hard drives while the file systems on the logical volumes need not to backed up and recovered, and you may create many snapshots of the…
In this post, creating a file-backed virtual block device (VBD) and installing Fedora 20 in the Xen DomU via internet will be introduced. This domain is created on a Fedora 20 Dom0 as introduced in https://www.systutorials.com/installing-xen-on-fedora-20-as-domain-0/. For better performance, you may consider using LVM backed VM. Create file-backed VBD The actual space of VBD will…
An introduction to the general method of installing Domain-U on Xen is introduced here: Setting Up Stable Xen DomU with Fedora: Unmodified Fedora 12 on top of Xenified Fedora 12 Dom0 with Xen (this is a general introduction, some details are changed, such as ‘xl’ replacing ‘xm’, LVM backing the disk for higher performance. But…
We introduced how to create a LVM group with two hard disk partitions, which the LVM group can be used for [[setting-up-lvm-backed-xen-domu|installing LVM backed Xen DomUs]]. The LVM volume can have large capacity from several hard disks. However, we may use all the disk space after some time and we may need to extend the…
Setting up Ubuntu 10.10 DomU on top of Fedora Xen Dom0 is introduced in this post. The process of setting up Ubuntu 10.10 DomU is the same as Setting Up Stable Xen DomU with Fedora: Unmodified Fedora 12 on top of Xenified Fedora 12 Dom0 with Xen 4.0 This post only show the difference which…
How to create a LVM group from two hard disk partitions is introduced in this post. Assume we have installed two hard disks /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc to the server, our task now is to create one LVM volume group vg_xen for installing LVM backed Xen DomUs from these two disks. We will do this by…
LVM volumes as backing for DomU’s file system is an appealing solution to Xen VBD. LVM volumes can dynamically grow/shrink and snapshot. These features make it simple and fast to duplicate DomU and adding storage to DomU. Creating LVM-backed Xen DomU is introduced in this post. Create LVM-backed VBD Suppose we have a LVM volume…
LVM’s snapshot feature enables us to duplicate an LVM backed Xen DomU in seconds rather than minutes. We no longer need to copy the entire file system image like backing up file backed Xen DomU. We just need to make a snapshot of the current Xen DomU in seconds. When there are changes to the…
LVM’s snapshot feature enables us to duplicate an LVM backed Xen DomU in seconds inside of the same volume group. When we want to duplicate LVM backed Xen DomU from a remote server, we need to make use of LVM’s snapshot function and tools like scp and dd. Backing up the DomU is only part…