5.4.4. Creating Thinly-Provisioned Logical Volumes
As of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 release, logical volumes can be thinly provisioned. This allows you to create logical volumes that are larger than the available extents. Using thin provisioning, you can manage a storage pool of free space, known as a thin pool, which can be allocated to an arbitrary number of devices when needed by applications. You can then create devices that can be bound to the thin pool for later allocation when an application actually writes to the logical volume. The thin pool can be expanded dynamically when needed for cost-effective allocation of storage space.
Note
This section provides an overview of the basic commands you use to create and grow thinly-provisioned logical volumes. For detailed information on LVM thin provisioning as well as information on using the LVM commands and utilities with thinly-provisioned logical volumes, see the
lvmthin(7) man page.
Note
Thin volumes are not supported across the nodes in a cluster. The thin pool and all its thin volumes must be exclusively activated on only one cluster node.
To create a thin volume, you perform the following tasks:
- Create a volume group with the
vgcreatecommand. - Create a thin pool with the
lvcreatecommand. - Create a thin volume in the thin pool with the
lvcreatecommand.
You can use the
-T (or --thin) option of the lvcreate command to create either a thin pool or a thin volume. You can also use -T option of the lvcreate command to create both a thin pool and a thin volume in that pool at the same time with a single command.
The following command uses the
-T option of the lvcreate command to create a thin pool named mythinpool that is in the volume group vg001 and that is 100M in size. Note that since you are creating a pool of physical space, you must specify the size of the pool. The -T option of the lvcreate command does not take an argument; it deduces what type of device is to be created from the other options the command specifies.
#lvcreate -L 100M -T vg001/mythinpoolRounding up size to full physical extent 4.00 MiB Logical volume "mythinpool" created #lvsLV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Move Log Copy% Convert my mythinpool vg001 twi-a-tz 100.00m 0.00
The following command uses the
-T option of the lvcreate command to create a thin volume named thinvolume in the thin pool vg001/mythinpool. Note that in this case you are specifying virtual size, and that you are specifying a virtual size for the volume that is greater than the pool that contains it.
#lvcreate -V1G -T vg001/mythinpool -n thinvolumeLogical volume "thinvolume" created #lvsLV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Move Log Copy% Convert mythinpool vg001 twi-a-tz 100.00m 0.00 thinvolume vg001 Vwi-a-tz 1.00g mythinpool 0.00
The following command uses the
-T option of the lvcreate command to create a thin pool and a thin volume in that pool by specifying both a size and a virtual size argument for the lvcreate command. This command creates a thin pool named mythinpool in the volume group vg001 and it also creates a thin volume named thinvolume in that pool.
#lvcreate -L 100M -T vg001/mythinpool -V1G -n thinvolumeRounding up size to full physical extent 4.00 MiB Logical volume "thinvolume" created #lvsLV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Move Log Copy% Convert mythinpool vg001 twi-a-tz 100.00m 0.00 thinvolume vg001 Vwi-a-tz 1.00g mythinpool 0.00
You can also create a thin pool by specifying the
--thinpool parameter of the lvcreate command. Unlike the -T option, the --thinpool parameter requires an argument, which is the name of the thin pool logical volume that you are creating. The following example specifies the --thinpool parameter of the lvcreate command to create a thin pool named mythinpool that is in the volume group vg001 and that is 100M in size:
#lvcreate -L 100M --thinpool mythinpool vg001Rounding up size to full physical extent 4.00 MiB Logical volume "mythinpool" created #lvsLV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Move Log Copy% Convert mythinpool vg001 twi-a-tz 100.00m 0.00
Striping is supported for pool creation. The following command creates a 100M thin pool named
pool in volume group vg001 with two 64 kB stripes and a chunk size of 256 kB. It also creates a 1T thin volume, vg00/thin_lv.
# lvcreate -i 2 -I 64 -c 256 -L100M -T vg00/pool -V 1T --name thin_lv
You can extend the size of a thin volume with the
lvextend command. You cannot, however, reduce the size of a thin pool.
The following command resizes an existing thin pool that is 100M in size by extending it another 100M.
#lvextend -L+100M vg001/mythinpoolExtending logical volume mythinpool to 200.00 MiB Logical volume mythinpool successfully resized #lvsLV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Move Log Copy% Convert mythinpool vg001 twi-a-tz 200.00m 0.00 thinvolume vg001 Vwi-a-tz 1.00g mythinpool 0.00
As with other types of logical volumes, you can rename the volume with the
lvrename, you can remove the volume with the lvremove, and you can display information about the volume with the lvs and lvdisplay commands.
By default, the
lvcreate command sets the size of the thin pool's metadata logical volume according to the formula (Pool_LV_size / Pool_LV_chunk_size * 64). You cannot currently resize the metadata volume, however, so if you expect significant growth of the size of thin pool at a later time you should increase this value with the --poolmetadatasize parameter of the lvcreate command. The supported value for the thin pool's metadata logical volume is in the range between 2MiB and 16GiB.
You can use the
--thinpool parameter of the lvconvert command to convert an existing logical volume to a thin pool volume. When you convert an existing logical volume to a thin pool volume, you must use the --poolmetadata parameter in conjunction with the --thinpool parameter of the lvconvert to convert an existing logical volume to the thin pool volume's metadata volume.
Note
Converting a logical volume to a thin pool volume or a thin pool metadata volume destroys the content of the logical volume, since in this case the
lvconvert does not preserve the content of the devices but instead overwrites the content.
The following example converts the existing logical volume
lv1 in volume group vg001 to a thin pool volume and converts the existing logical volume lv2 in volume group vg001 to the metadata volume for that thin pool volume.
# lvconvert --thinpool vg001/lv1 --poolmetadata vg001/lv2
Converted vg001/lv1 to thin pool.
