Expanding LVM on a live server is a big challenge. At least for me it was big enough. That too when you’re doing it for the first time you will be bit more scared. DELL PowerEdge comes with RAID-5. We recently added a 5th drive into this array and configured that as the VirtualDisk via DELL Server management tool called OpenManage.
The next step involves expanding the size of the partition without formatting the content. Following link helped us a lot with this LVM Expansion but before that, we had to run fdisk on the drive and delete the partition first (without writing it), then recreate and set the partition id to Linux LVM. Finally write all these changes to disk and reboot the server. Once this is done, expanding LVM is easy. Deleting partition in fdisk is very scary. You have to be very sure about such commands on Linux box. Thanks to Dave from Atjeu for testing all this on a test server before implementing.
Ubuntu Forum thread which gave me the required hint.
(We used the instructions from step13 onwards)
Here is what we had to do with the LVM expansion.
fdisk /dev/sda2
umount /var/backup
pvdisplay
pvresize /dev/sda
pvdisplay
lvextend -v -l +4372 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04
vgdisplay -A
resize2fs -p /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04
e2fsck -f -v /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04
resize2fs -p /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04
e2fsck -f -v /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04
e2fsck -D /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04
df -h
mount /var/backup
Here /dev/sda2 is the patition, /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol04 is the volume which we wanted to expand. /var/backup is the mount point.
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