Storage: LVM Thin
Storage pool type: lvmthin
LVM normally allocates blocks when you create a volume. LVM thin pools instead allocates blocks when they are written. This behaviour is called thin-provisioning, because volumes can be much larger than physically available space.
You can use the normal LVM command-line tools to manage and create LVM thin pools (see man lvmthin for details). Assuming you already have a LVM volume group called pve, the following commands create a new LVM thin pool (size 100G) called data:
lvcreate -L 100G -n data pve lvconvert --type thin-pool pve/data
Configuration
The LVM thin backend supports the common storage properties content, nodes, disable, and the following LVM specific properties:
- vgname
-
LVM volume group name. This must point to an existing volume group.
- thinpool
-
The name of the LVM thin pool.
lvmthin: local-lvm thinpool data vgname pve content rootdir,images
File naming conventions
The backend use basically the same naming conventions as the ZFS pool backend.
vm-<VMID>-<NAME> // normal VM images
Storage Features
LVM thin is a block storage, but fully supports snapshots and clones efficiently. New volumes are automatically initialized with zero.
It must be mentioned that LVM thin pools cannot be shared across multiple nodes, so you can only use them as local storage.
Content types | Image formats | Shared | Snapshots | Clones |
---|---|---|---|---|
images rootdir |
raw |
no |
yes |
yes |
Examples
List available LVM thin pools on volume group pve:
# pvesm lvmthinscan pve
See Also