Solaris / Resizing LVM PVs (was: Debian experiences)

Tom Buskey tom at buskey.name
Sun Nov 5 16:56:49 EST 2006


On 11/5/06, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/4/06, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
> > PF is excellent and I wish Linux would adopt it.  It has been ported to FreeBSD and
> > NetBSD FWIW.
>
>   At this point, the Linux firewall subsystem has gone through three
> major rewrites, and people still say pf is better.  I have to start
> suspecting pf wasn't adopted just because it was Not Invented Here.

PF is a rewrite of IPF with the same syntax except for somethings that
make it better.  Like OpenSSH, it was written because the license
didn't fit the OpenBSD umm philosophy.  I think IPF was ported to
Linux.  IPF runs on almost everything else.  MacOSX uses IPF.

> >>    Does anyone know if there is a way to non-destructively resize a
> >> Linux LVM PV (Physical Volume)?
> >
> > Something like pvreduce?

forgot <joke> </joke>

>   Does such a thing exist?  I don't have a command by that name, and
> Google only finds thinkos for "lvreduce".

I see vgreduce :-)  That removes whole volumes from the LVM though.


>
> >>   One of my disks consists of a single giant primary partition, which
> >> is a Linux LVM PV.  I could easily free up a few dozen gigs for
> >> Solaris to play in on that disk.  But I don't have enough spare disk
> >
> > 9GB is enough for everything.  Solaris x86 even uses grub.
>
>   It's not the size of Solaris, it's the size of everything else.
>
>   I've got two disks, 80 GB and 320 GB.  The 80 GB disk has four
> primary partitions: 40 MB Dell utility, 30 GB Wintendo, 250 MB Linux
> boot, and 49 GB LVM PV.  The 320 GB disk has a single primary
> partition as LVM PV.  The two different disks are also different VGs,
> as I did not want PEs between the two mixing for reliability reasons.
> I've currently got more than 200 GB used on the second disk.
>
>   The only way I can think of to make room with existing tools would
> be reduce the LVs on the second disk, create new LVs on that disk,
> move the contents of the filesystems in the LVs on the first disk to
> the second disk, nuke the first disk's PV entirely, create an extended
> partition in the last primary slot, and create logical partitions for
> the PVs and Solaris, and then move things back from the second disk to
> the first one.  Yuck!  I don't want to try Solaris *that* badly.  ;-)

I wouldn't either :-)  I've been using VMware server for playing with
OSes.  Solaris works well within that and you can run VMware server on
linux.  You can give Solaris virtual disks or raw partitions.  It's
about a 20-30% performance hit i've found.  If you have lots of RAM
and a faster CPU, it's not bad.  Me, my home server is a dual PIII 500
with 512MB.  At work I have 2 Xenon 3.mumble GHz systems with 3GB RAM.
 One with 2 CPUs.  They seem pretty decent for running a few VMs.

>
>   A third disk would also get the job done, but this is a SATA system
> and I don't have any extra SATA disks.

You've probably got extra SCSI or PATA disks though.  The march of
progress.  *sigh*

Someone was working on a thumb drive version of Solaris based on one
of the OpenSolaris distributions.


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