How to create a Linux LVM partition

Last updated on July 6, 2020 by Dan Nanni

In Linux, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) manages physical disk drives by using the notion of "logical" volumes. A "volume" could be a partition or an entire disk drive. Among other things, LVM allows you to create one or more logical volumes out of one or more physical volumes, resize logical volumes on-the-fly, and move logical volumes across different physical volumes. Such flexible disk management of LVM is a great advantage as re-partitioning is often necessary while you are running your system. If you would like to try out LVM, here is a 3-minute guide on how to create a Linux LVM partition. If you are interested, you can always read a more detailed tutorial on LVM.

Typically LVM comes with most Linux distros, but to make sure to install a necessary tool for LVM:

$ sudo apt-get install lvm2

First, prepare a physical LVM partition using fdisk. After creating a new partition, make sure to set its partition type to 8e (LVM). Assume that the drive to create a physical LVM partition on is /dev/sdb.

$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
[create a LVM partition: /dev/sdb1]

Next, create a LVM physical volume on the prepared partition /dev/sdb1:

$ sudo pvcreate /dev/sdb1

Inside the LVM physical volume, create a LVM volume group called my_vol with a physical extent (PE) size of 16MB. Note that PE size needs to be a power of 2.

$ sudo vgcreate -s 16M my_vol /dev/sdb1

Create a 1GB logical volume called drive0 on volume group my_vol:

$ sudo lvcreate -L 1G -n drive0 my_vol

At this point, you will see /dev/my_vol/drive0 which is the device name of the LVM volume you've just created. Finally, proceed to create a filesystem and mount it as follows.

$ sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/my_vol/drive0
$ sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/my_vol/drive0 /mnt

If you want to have the LVM partition mounted permanently across reboots, refer to this tutorial.

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