Volumegroup using entire disks instead of partition - Extending online Vmware

Question

Is it possible when using entire disk for volume groups to extend the assigned disks space from the vmware console, and then online the volume group after rescanning host to know the new size, or to force it know the new size.

e.g i have a disk 200GB and i have used to create the vgcreate entire disk instead of partition, if i resize the disk to 250GB in vmware console and force rescan of scsi_device in guest os(Linux) will that update occur to the volume group or is there a way to make it happen?

Currently i am creating a partition with the maximum and in case of expanding the same disk i create a new partition and use vgextend to make it available.

I am kinda new to lvm so i would appreciate a possible workaround to that.

This is required to be done without unmounting any partition or the disk

Completely on-the-fly!

Answer 1

It is completely fine to add additional disks to the volume group with vgextend. You need all of them for the VG to work of course.

You can force a rescan for the disks in the guest by echoing values into scsi_host nodes There should be a message from the kernel in syslog.

I prefer to manage LVM PVs as partitions. parted is a useful tool to do this with its resizepart command. -0 being the end of disk is a convenient for the end of the last partition.

pvresize will extend the PV to use the larger disk. The VG is larger when this succeeds.