Hackery

pvmove Disk Migrations

Thu 06 Aug 2009

Lots of people make use of linux's lvm (Logical Volume Manager) for providing services such as disk volume resizing and snapshotting under linux. But few people seem to know about the little pvmove utility, which offers a very powerful facility for migrating data between disk volumes on the fly.

Let's say, for example, that you have a disk volume you need to rebuild for some reason. Perhaps you want to change the raid type you're using on it; perhaps you want to rebuild it using larger disks. Whatever the reason, you need to migrate all your data to another temporary disk volume so you can rebuild your initial one.

The standard way of doing this is probably to just create a new filesystem on your new disk volume, and then copy or rsync all the data across. But how do you verify that you have all the data at the end of the copy, and that nothing has changed on your original disk after the copy started? If you did a second rsync and nothing new was copied across, and the disk usage totals exactly match, and you remember to unmount the original disk immediately, you might have an exact copy. But if your original disk data is changing at all, getting a good copy of a large disk volume can actually be pretty tricky.

The elegant lvm/pvmove solution to this problem is this: instead of doing a userspace migration between disk volumes, you add your new volume into the existing volume group, and then tell lvm to move all the physical extents off of your old physical volume, and the migration is magically handled by lvm, without even needing to unmount the logical volume!

# Volume group 'extra' exists on physical volume /dev/sdc1
$ lvs
  LV   VG     Attr   LSize  Origin Snap%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
  data extra  -wi-ao 100.00G

# Add new physical volume /dev/sdd1 into volume group
$ vgextend extra /dev/sdd1
  Volume group "extra" successfully extended
$ lvs
  LV   VG     Attr   LSize  Origin Snap%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
  data extra  -wi-ao 200.00G

# Use pvmove to move physical extents off of old /dev/sdc1 (verbose mode)
$ pvmove -v /dev/sdc1
# Lots of output in verbose mode ...

# Done - remove old physical volume
$ pvremove /dev/sdc1
$ lvs
  LV   VG     Attr   LSize  Origin Snap%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
  data extra  -wi-ao 100.00G

The joys of linux.