A Guide to Creating LVM Logical Volumes on AWS EBS and Resizing Them

Introduction

If anything goes wrong, you can restore the volume anytime. To increase the flexibility of your web servers, you can later scale your web servers. This blog will help you increase the disk space of an Amazon EC2 instance.

Prerequisites

AWS Account

Step-by-Step Guide

Step 1 – Backup EBS Volume

1. Log in to your AWS account and go to EC2 service. Go to the Volumes tab under Amazon Elastic Block Store from the left side.
2. It will give all the available EBS volumes there. Select the EBS volume of the instance you want to resize and click on the ‘Action’ button on top.
3. Now it will ask for a description add, and in the last click on Create snapshot.
4. Wait till the snapshot status changes to available. Move to the next section.

Step 2 – Create Physical Volume and add it to the Volume Group

1. Execute the “gdisk” command to create a partition. For the variable Hex code or GUID, enter 8e00. In the below screenshot, we are creating the partition /dev/xvdf1 on /dev/xvdf.

2. Now execute the “pvcreate” command to create a physical volume from the partition.

3. Run the “vgcreate” command to create a volume group to combine the new physical volumes.

4. Use the “vgdisplay” to view the volume group details.

Step 3 – Create a Logical volume and mount a directory

1. To create a logical volume, run “lvcreate” command to create logical volumes (partitions) from your volume group(vg1).
2. Run the “lvdisplay” command to view the logical volume created in the above step.

3. Now create a directory using the “mkdir” command to mount the directory.

4. Execute the “mkfs -t” command to create the file system -t represents the target. Note: Replace xfs with your file system type if different. For example, use ext2, ext3, or ext4.

5. Run the “mount” command to mount the file system.

6. Edit “/etc/fstab” file so that the new mount remains permanent after reboot/ restart the machine.

Step 4 – Extend the Logical Volume

1. Modify the size of the existing EBS volume.

2. Now execute the “growpart” command to extend the partition, and then run the “pvresize /dev/xvdf1” command to resize the physical volume. In the below example, partition /dev/xvdf1 is extended.

3. To check physical volume details, execute the “pvdisplay” command. Use the “vgdisplay” to view the volume group details.

4. Run the “lvextend” command to extend the logical volume. Use the “lvdisplay” command to view the logical volume details.

Note: –

To increase the XFS filesystem size, the xfs_growfs command is used.

Conclusion

We can expand volume at any time according to demand. More volumes can be added to existing LVM volume instead of creating a snapshot of a volume and expanding it with improved performance and availability.

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