Linux Administration Cookbook

Physical disks

To start, we need to know which physical volumes LVM is aware of; this is accomplished with pvs or pvdisplay:

$ sudo pvs PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree /dev/sda3 VolGroup00 lvm2 a-- <38.97g 0$ sudo pvdisplay --- Physical volume --- PV Name /dev/sda3 VG Name VolGroup00 PV Size <39.00 GiB / not usable 30.00 MiB Allocatable yes (but full) PE Size 32.00 MiB Total PE 1247 Free PE 0 Allocated PE 1247 PV UUID vrrtbx-g480-HcJI-5wLn-4aOf-Olld-rC03AY

Note how sudo pvs is a more traditional, unix-y output, whereas the second is more intended for human parsing.

Here, we can see that the only physical device LVM is aware of is the sda3 partition atop the sda device.

A physical volume in LVM land can be either an entire device (sda) or a partition ...