5.4.14. Growing Logical Volumes To increase the size of a logical volume, use the lvextend command. When you extend the logical volume, you can indicate how much you want to extend the volume, or how large you want it to be after you extend it. The following command extends the logical volume /dev/myvg/homevol to 12 gigabytes. The following command adds another gigabyte to the logical volume /dev/myvg/homevol . As with the lvcreate command, you can use the -l argument of the lvextend command to specify the number of extents by which to increase the size of the logical volume. You can also use this argument to specify a percentage of the volume group, or a percentage of the remaining free space in the volume group. The following command extends the logical volume called testlv to fill all of the unallocated space in the volume group myvg . After you have extended the logical volume it is necessary to increase the file system size to match. By default, most file system resizing tools will increase the size of the file system to be the size of the underlying logical volume so you do not need to worry about specifying the same size for each of the two commands. 5.4.14.1. Extending a Striped Volume In order to increase the size of a striped logical volume, there must be enough free space on the underlying physical volumes that make up the volume group to support the stripe. For example, if you have a two-way stripe that that uses up an entire volume group, adding a single physical volume to the volume group will not enable you to extend the stripe. Instead, you must add at least two physical volumes to the volume group. For example, consider a volume group vg that consists of two underlying physical volumes, as displayed with the following vgs command. You can create a stripe using the entire amount of space in the volume group. Note that the volume group now has no more free space. The following command adds another physical volume to the volume group, which then has 135G of additional space. At this point you cannot extend the striped logical volume to the full size of the volume group, because two underlying devices are needed in order to stripe the data. To extend the striped logical volume, add another physical volume and then extend the logical volume. In this example, having added two physical volumes to the volume group we can extend the logical volume to the full size of the volume group. If you do not have enough underlying physical devices to extend the striped logical volume, it is possible to extend the volume anyway if it does not matter that the extension is not striped, which may result in uneven performance. When adding space to the logical volume, the default operation is to use the same striping parameters of the last segment of the existing logical volume, but you can override those parameters. The following example extends the existing striped logical volume to use the remaining free space after the initial lvextend command fails.

Commands:
lvextend -L12G /dev/myvg/homevol lvextend -- extending logical volume "/dev/myvg/homevol" to 12 GB lvextend -- doing automatic backup of volume group "myvg" lvextend -- logical volume "/dev/myvg/homevol" successfully extended
lvextend -L+1G /dev/myvg/homevol lvextend -- extending logical volume "/dev/myvg/homevol" to 13 GB lvextend -- doing automatic backup of volume group "myvg" lvextend -- logical volume "/dev/myvg/homevol" successfully extended
lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/myvg/testlv Extending logical volume testlv to 68.59 GB Logical volume testlv successfully resized
vgs VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree vg 2 0 0 wz--n- 271.31G 271.31G
lvcreate -n stripe1 -L 271.31G -i 2 vg Using default stripesize 64.00 KB Rounding up size to full physical extent 271.31 GB Logical volume "stripe1" created lvs -a -o +devices LV VG Attr LSize Origin Snap% Move Log Copy% Devices stripe1 vg -wi-a- 271.31G /dev/sda1(0),/dev/sdb1(0)
vgs VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree vg 2 1 0 wz--n- 271.31G 0
vgextend vg /dev/sdc1 Volume group "vg" successfully extended vgs VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree vg 3 1 0 wz--n- 406.97G 135.66G
lvextend vg/stripe1 -L 406G Using stripesize of last segment 64.00 KB Extending logical volume stripe1 to 406.00 GB Insufficient suitable allocatable extents for logical volume stripe1: 34480 more required
vgextend vg /dev/sdd1 Volume group "vg" successfully extended vgs VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree vg 4 1 0 wz--n- 542.62G 271.31G lvextend vg/stripe1 -L 542G Using stripesize of last segment 64.00 KB Extending logical volume stripe1 to 542.00 GB Logical volume stripe1 successfully resized
lvextend vg/stripe1 -L 406G Using stripesize of last segment 64.00 KB Extending logical volume stripe1 to 406.00 GB Insufficient suitable allocatable extents for logical volume stripe1: 34480 more required lvextend -i1 -l+100%FREE vg/stripe1