LVM Physical Volumes
The bottom layer of LVM, and the shortest of the three objectives. What is worth knowing is how a physical volume appears to the rest of the system - lsblk calls it LVM2_member - and that it cannot be removed while a volume group still claims it.
Local Storage Guide 32 of 67 Intermediate
- OSRHEL 10.0
- Kernel6.12.0-55.9.1.el10_0
- dnf4.20.0
- Flatpak1.16.0
- TimeAbout 10 min
A physical volume can be a whole disk (/dev/sdb) or a partition (/dev/sdb1). Both work. A partition is the usual choice because it makes the space visible to anything reading the partition table, where a whole-disk PV looks like an empty disk to tools that do not understand LVM.
| Server Name | IP Address | OS | Roles | CPU | RAM | HDD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RHCSA-A01 | 192.168.0.31 | RHEL 10.0 | Practice node (graded) - spare /dev/sda | 2 Core | 4 GB | 50 GB + 15 GB |
This guide includes
Use this for the bottom layer of LVM. This matters because a physical volume is a disk or partition with LVM metadata written onto it - and it looks quite different from outside LVM than from inside.
- seeing the LVM stack, and what is already on the machine
- creating physical volumes
- seeing what a PV looks like from outside LVM
Before you start
- Two spare partitions -
guide 31creates them. - Every destructive command on this page names a
/dev/sdadevice. On this machine the operating system is entirely on/dev/sdb. Check yours before running anything here - the first step shows how.
-
The stack, and what is already there
-
Creating them
-
What a PV looks like from outside LVM