3.2. Logical Volume Creation Overview

The following is a summary of the steps to perform to create an LVM logical volume.

Initialize the partitions you will use for the LVM volume as physical volumes (this labels them).
Create a volume group.
Create a logical volume.

After creating the logical volume you can create and mount the file system. The examples in this document use GFS2 file systems.

Note

Although a GFS2 file system can be implemented in a standalone system or as part of a cluster configuration, for the Red Hat Enterprise 6 release Red Hat does not support the use of GFS2 as a single-node file system. Red Hat will continue to support single-node GFS2 file systems for mounting snapshots of cluster file systems (for example, for backup purposes).

Create a GFS2 file system on the logical volume with the mkfs.gfs2 command.
Create a new mount point with the mkdir command. In a clustered system, create the mount point on all nodes in the cluster.
Mount the file system. You may want to add a line to the fstab file for each node in the system.

Alternately, you can create and mount the GFS2 file system with the LVM GUI.

Creating the LVM volume is machine independent, since the storage area for LVM setup information is on the physical volumes and not the machine where the volume was created. Servers that use the storage have local copies, but can recreate that from what is on the physical volumes. You can attach physical volumes to a different server if the LVM versions are compatible.