5.3.6. Scanning Disks for Volume Groups to Build the Cache File
The
vgscan
command scans all supported disk devices in the system looking for LVM physical volumes and volume groups. This builds the LVM cache file in the /etc/lvm/cache/.cache
file, which maintains a listing of current LVM devices.
LVM runs the
vgscan
command automatically at system startup and at other times during LVM operation, such as when you execute a vgcreate
command or when LVM detects an inconsistency.
Note
You may need to run the
vgscan
command manually when you change your hardware configuration and add or delete a device from a node, causing new devices to be visible to the system that were not present at system bootup. This may be necessary, for example, when you add new disks to the system on a SAN or hotplug a new disk that has been labeled as a physical volume.
You can define a filter in the
lvm.conf
file to restrict the scan to avoid specific devices. For information on using filters to control which devices are scanned, see Section 5.5, “Controlling LVM Device Scans with Filters”.
The following example shows the output of a
vgscan
command.
# vgscan
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
Found volume group "new_vg" using metadata type lvm2
Found volume group "officevg" using metadata type lvm2