HOWTO: Resize a Linux VM's LLVM Virtual Disk on a ZVOL

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If you have a Linux VM, which uses the LLVM filesystem, you can easily increase the disk space available to the VM.

Linux Logical Volume Manager allows you to have logical volumes (LV) on top of logical volume groups (VG) on top of physical volumes (PV) (ie partitions).

This is conceptually similar to zvols on pools on vdevs in zfs.

This was tested with TrueNAS-CORE 12 and Ubuntu 20.04.

Firstly, there are some useful commands:

pvs - list physical volumes
lvs - list logical volumes
lvdisplay - logical volume display
pvdisplay - physical volume display
df - disk free space

So, to start

df -h - show disk free space, human readable

and you should see something like this

Filesystem                         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
dev                               2.9G     0  2.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs                              595M   61M  535M  11% /run
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv  8.4G  8.1G     0 100% /
tmpfs                              3.0G     0  3.0G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                              5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock

This is the interesting line:

/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv  8.4G  8.1G     0 100% /

it gives you the hint of which LV and VG the root drive is using.

you can list the logical volumes lvs

root@ubuntu:/# lvs
  LV        VG        Attr       LSize  Pool Origin Data%  Meta%  Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert
  ubuntu-lv ubuntu-vg -wi-ao---- <8.50g

and physical volumes pvs

root@ubuntu:/# pvs
  PV         VG        Fmt  Attr PSize  PFree
  /dev/vda3  ubuntu-vg lvm2 a--  <8.50g    0

Now you can see that the ubuntu-lv LV is on the ubuntu-vg VG is on the PV /dev/vda3

(that’s partition 3 of device vda)

Shutdown the VM. Edit the ZVOL to change the size. Restart the VM.

Once you get back, run parted with the device id, repair the GPT information and resize the partition, as per below.

launch parted on the disk parted /dev/vda

root@ubuntu:~# parted /dev/vda
GNU Parted 3.3
Using /dev/vda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.

view the partitions

print

(parted) print                                                        
Warning: Not all of the space available to /dev/vda appears to be used, you can fix the GPT to use all of the space (an extra 188743680
blocks) or continue with the current setting?

Parted will offer to fix the GPT. Fix it. f

Fix/Ignore? f
Model: Virtio Block Device (virtblk)
Disk /dev/vda: 107GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/16384B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name  Flags
1      1049kB  538MB   537MB   fat32              boot, esp
2      538MB   1612MB  1074MB  ext4
3      1612MB  10.7GB  9125MB

The disk is resized, but the partition is not.

Resize partition 3 to 100%, resizepart 3 100%

(parted) resizepart 3 100%
(parted) print                                                        
Model: Virtio Block Device (virtblk)
Disk /dev/vda: 107GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/16384B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name  Flags
1      1049kB  538MB   537MB   fat32              boot, esp
2      538MB   1612MB  1074MB  ext4
3      1612MB  107GB   106GB

(parted)

And the partition is resized. You can exit parted with quit

now we need to resize the physical volume

pvresize /dev/vda3

root@ubuntu:~# pvresize /dev/vda3
  Physical volume "/dev/vda3" changed
  1 physical volume(s) resized or updated / 0 physical volume(s) not resized

You can check the result with pvdisplay

root@ubuntu:~# pvdisplay
  --- Physical volume ---
  PV Name               /dev/vda3
  VG Name               ubuntu-vg
  PV Size               <98.50 GiB / not usable 1.98 MiB
  Allocatable           yes
  PE Size               4.00 MiB
  Total PE              25215
  Free PE               23040
  Allocated PE          2175
  PV UUID               IGdmTf-7Iql-V9UK-q3aD-BdNP-VfBo-VPx1Hs

Then you can use lvextend to resize the LV and resize the the filesystem, over the resized pv.

lvextend --resizefs ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv /dev/vda3

root@ubuntu:~# lvextend --resizefs ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv /dev/vda3
  Size of logical volume ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv changed from <8.50 GiB (2175 extents) to <98.50 GiB (25215 extents).
  Logical volume ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv successfully resized.
resize2fs 1.45.5 (07-Jan-2020)
Filesystem at /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old_desc_blocks = 2, new_desc_blocks = 13
The filesystem on /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv is now 25820160 (4k) blocks long.

root@ubuntu:~#

and finally… you can check the freespace again.

df -h

root@ubuntu:~# df -h
Filesystem                         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                               2.9G     0  2.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs                              595M  1.1M  594M   1% /run
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv   97G  8.2G   85G   9% /

85G free instead of 0 much better.

–
Original TrueNAS Community Resource

2

I ported this here because I use it periodically myself :wink:

It should work on scale, as the recipe is really how to grow an LLVM partition once the underlying media mysteriously increases, not anything specific to CORE as such.

Plus I know general Linux users use it when they’ve used some other method to grow their disk space… not just embiggening a ZVOL.

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Would you like this moved to the Resources section?

4

Yes please

“Post must be at least 20 characters”

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