4.3.4. Displaying Volume Groups

There are two commands you can use to display properties of LVM volume groups: vgs and vgdisplay.

The vgscan command, which scans all the disks for volume groups and rebuilds the LVM cache file, also displays the volume groups. For information on the vgscan command, see Section 4.3.5, “Scanning Disks for Volume Groups to Build the Cache File”.

The vgs command provides volume group information in a configurable form, displaying one line per volume group. The vgs command provides a great deal of format control, and is useful for scripting. For information on using the vgs command to customize your output, see Section 4.8, “Customized Reporting for LVM”.

The vgdisplay command displays volume group properties (such as size, extents, number of physical volumes, etc.) in a fixed form. The following example shows the output of a vgdisplay command for the volume group new_vg. If you do not specify a volume group, all existing volume groups are displayed.

# vgdisplay new_vg
  --- Volume group ---
  VG Name               new_vg
  System ID
  Format                lvm2
  Metadata Areas        3
  Metadata Sequence No  11
  VG Access             read/write
  VG Status             resizable
  MAX LV                0
  Cur LV                1
  Open LV               0
  Max PV                0
  Cur PV                3
  Act PV                3
  VG Size               51.42 GB
  PE Size               4.00 MB
  Total PE              13164
  Alloc PE / Size       13 / 52.00 MB
  Free  PE / Size       13151 / 51.37 GB
  VG UUID               jxQJ0a-ZKk0-OpMO-0118-nlwO-wwqd-fD5D32