View source for Logical Volume Manager (LVM)

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Most people install Proxmox VE directly on a local disk. The Proxmox VE
installation CD offers several options for local disk management, and
the current default setup uses LVM. The installer lets you select a
single disk for such setup, and uses that disk as physical volume for
the Volume Group (VG) pve. The following output is from a
test installation using a small 8GB disk:
# pvs
  PV         VG   Fmt  Attr PSize PFree
  /dev/sda3  pve  lvm2 a--  7.87g 876.00m
# vgs
  VG   #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize VFree
  pve    1   3   0 wz--n- 7.87g 876.00m
The installer allocates three Logical Volumes (LV) inside this
VG:
# lvs
  LV   VG   Attr       LSize   Pool Origin Data%  Meta%
  data pve  twi-a-tz--   4.38g             0.00   0.63
  root pve  -wi-ao----   1.75g
  swap pve  -wi-ao---- 896.00m
root
Formatted as ext4, and contains the operating system.
swap
Swap partition
data
This volume uses LVM-thin, and is used to store VM
images. LVM-thin is preferable for this task, because it offers
efficient support for snapshots and clones.
For Proxmox VE versions up to 4.1, the installer creates a standard logical
volume called &#8220;data&#8221;, which is mounted at /var/lib/vz.
Starting from version 4.2, the logical volume &#8220;data&#8221; is a LVM-thin pool,
used to store block based guest images, and /var/lib/vz is simply a
directory on the root file system.
Hardware
We highly recommend to use a hardware RAID controller (with BBU) for
such setups. This increases performance, provides redundancy, and make
disk replacements easier (hot-pluggable).
LVM itself does not need any special hardware, and memory requirements
are very low.
Bootloader
We install two boot loaders by default. The first partition contains
the standard GRUB boot loader. The second partition is an EFI System
Partition (ESP), which makes it possible to boot on EFI systems and to
apply persistent firmware updates from the
user space.
Creating a Volume Group
Let&#8217;s assume we have an empty disk /dev/sdb, onto which we want to
create a volume group named &#8220;vmdata&#8221;.
Please note that the following commands will destroy all
existing data on /dev/sdb.
First create a partition.
# sgdisk -N 1 /dev/sdb
Create a Physical Volume (PV) without confirmation and 250K
metadatasize.
# pvcreate --metadatasize 250k -y -ff /dev/sdb1
Create a volume group named &#8220;vmdata&#8221; on /dev/sdb1
# vgcreate vmdata /dev/sdb1
Creating an extra LV for /var/lib/vz
This can be easily done by creating a new thin LV.
# lvcreate -n &lt;Name&gt; -V &lt;Size[M,G,T]&gt; &lt;VG&gt;/&lt;LVThin_pool&gt;
A real world example:
# lvcreate -n vz -V 10G pve/data
Now a filesystem must be created on the LV.
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/pve/vz
At last this has to be mounted.
be sure that /var/lib/vz is empty. On a default
installation it&#8217;s not.
To make it always accessible add the following line in /etc/fstab.
# echo '/dev/pve/vz /var/lib/vz ext4 defaults 0 2' &gt;&gt; /etc/fstab
Resizing the thin pool
Resize the LV and the metadata pool with the following command:
# lvresize --size +&lt;size[\M,G,T]&gt; --poolmetadatasize +&lt;size[\M,G]&gt; &lt;VG&gt;/&lt;LVThin_pool&gt;
When extending the data pool, the metadata pool must also be
extended.
Create a LVM-thin pool
A thin pool has to be created on top of a volume group.
How to create a volume group see Section LVM.
# lvcreate -L 80G -T -n vmstore vmdata
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