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Systems & Data Center · Intermediate

Logical Volume (LV)

In LVM, a virtual block device allocated from a volume group that is formatted and mounted like a partition.

Definition

LVs appear as /dev/<vg>/<lv> and /dev/mapper/<vg>-<lv>. They can be extended or reduced, striped or mirrored, thin-provisioned and snapshotted without repartitioning disks.

Example

lvcreate -n lv_logs -L 50G vg_data creates a 50 GiB logical volume.

Exam tip

Shrinking an LV requires shrinking the filesystem first (not possible with XFS) to avoid data loss.

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