4.3.6. Removing Physical Volumes from a Volume Group

To remove unused physical volumes from a volume group, use the vgreduce command. The vgreduce command shrinks a volume group's capacity by removing one or more empty physical volumes. This frees those physical volumes to be used in different volume groups or to be removed from the system.

Before removing a physical volume from a volume group, you can make sure that the physical volume is not used by any logical volumes by using the pvdisplay command.

# pvdisplay /dev/hda1

-- Physical volume ---
PV Name               /dev/hda1
VG Name               myvg
PV Size               1.95 GB / NOT usable 4 MB [LVM: 122 KB]
PV#                   1
PV Status             available
Allocatable           yes (but full)
Cur LV                1
PE Size (KByte)       4096
Total PE              499
Free PE               0
Allocated PE          499
PV UUID               Sd44tK-9IRw-SrMC-MOkn-76iP-iftz-OVSen7

If the physical volume is still being used you will have to migrate the data to another physical volume using the pvmove command. Then use the vgreduce command to remove the physical volume:

The following command removes the physical volume /dev/hda1 from the volume group my_volume_group.

# vgreduce my_volume_group /dev/hda1