Logical Volume Manager with Linux November 2025

Terms

Thin provisioning is a feature that guarantees efficient use of storage space by allocating only what is needed and by storing data at adjacent locations.

Virtual Data Optimizer capitalizes on thin provisioning, de-duplication, and compression technologies to conesrve storage space, improve data throughput, and save money.

The Logical Volume Manager solution sets up an abstraction layer between the operating system and the storage hardware. It utilizes virtual objects for storage pooling and allocation.

A Physical Volume (PV) is a block storage device, such as a partition or an entire disk that has been initialized and brought under LVM control.

A Volume Group is a storage pool composed of the aggregated space from all the physical volumes that have been added to it, which is then used to build logical volumes.

A Physical Extent (PE) is the smallest unit of storage on a physical volume. PEs represent actual disk space on real devices.

A Logical Volume (LV) is a virtual partition carved out of a volume group. It acts like a traditional disk partition but it is much more flexible.

A Logical Extent is the smallest unit of storage allocation on a logical volume. Every LE maps 1:1 to a physical extent in the volume group. They represent the logical view of storage that the LV uses.

LVM Operations and Commands

The LVM toolset provides administrative commands to carry out disk and volume management operations.

Create and Remove Operations

pvcreate/pvremove		(Un)initializes a disk or partition for LVM use.
vgcreate/vgremove		Creates/removes a volume group.
lvcreate/lvremove		Creates/removes a logical volume.

Extend and Reduce Operations

vgextend/vgreduce		Adds/removes a physical volume to/from a volume group.
lvextend/lvreduce		Extends/reduces the size of a physical volume.
lvresize		Resizes a logical volume. With the -r option, this command calls the fsadm command to resize the underlying file system as well.

Rename Operations

vgrename		Renames a volume group.
lvrename		Renames a logical volume.

List and Display Operation

pvs/pvdisplay		Lists/displays physical volume information.
vgs/vgdisplay		Lists/displays volume group information.
lvs/lvdisplay		Lists/displays logical volume information.