5.3.7. Removing Physical Volumes from a Volume Group
To remove unused physical volumes from a volume group, use the
vgreduce command. The vgreduce command shrinks a volume group's capacity by removing one or more empty physical volumes. This frees those physical volumes to be used in different volume groups or to be removed from the system.
Before removing a physical volume from a volume group, you can make sure that the physical volume is not used by any logical volumes by using the
pvdisplay command.
# pvdisplay /dev/hda1
-- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/hda1
VG Name myvg
PV Size 1.95 GB / NOT usable 4 MB [LVM: 122 KB]
PV# 1
PV Status available
Allocatable yes (but full)
Cur LV 1
PE Size (KByte) 4096
Total PE 499
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 499
PV UUID Sd44tK-9IRw-SrMC-MOkn-76iP-iftz-OVSen7
If the physical volume is still being used you will have to migrate the data to another physical volume using the
pvmove command. Then use the vgreduce command to remove the physical volume.
The following command removes the physical volume
/dev/hda1 from the volume group my_volume_group.
# vgreduce my_volume_group /dev/hda1
If a logical volume contains a physical volume that fails, you cannot use that logical volume. To remove missing physical volumes from a volume group, you can use the
--removemissing parameter of the vgreduce command, if there are no logical volumes that are allocated on the missing physical volumes.
