Assign Physical Volumes to Volume Groups

Introduction

In this challenge, you will learn how to configure local storage by assigning physical volumes to a volume group. This is a fundamental skill for managing Logical Volume Management (LVM) on a Linux system and a common task in the RHCSA exam.

Assign Physical Volumes to a Volume Group

Logical Volume Management (LVM) provides a flexible way to manage disk space. The first step in using LVM is to initialize physical storage devices, known as Physical Volumes (PVs), and then group them into a Volume Group (VG). This challenge focuses on these initial steps.

This lab image includes one extra practice disk that the setup script partitions for you. The exact device name depends on the VM image, so inspect the available block devices and use the two prepared partitions from that extra disk.

Tasks

1. Initialize the two prepared partitions on the extra practice disk as LVM physical volumes.
2. Create a new volume group and add those two physical volumes to it.

Requirements

• The physical volumes must be created on the two partitions prepared on the extra practice disk.
• Depending on the VM image, those devices may appear as /dev/vdb1 and /dev/vdb2 or /dev/nvme0n1p1 and /dev/nvme0n1p2.
• The new volume group must be named vg_data.
• Use sudo to run commands that require root privileges.

Example

After you have successfully completed the tasks, running the sudo pvs and sudo vgs commands should produce output similar to the following. The exact sizes may vary slightly.

$ sudo pvs
  PV         VG      Fmt  Attr PSize      PFree
  /dev/nvme0n1p1  vg_data lvm2 a--    1024.00m   1024.00m
  /dev/nvme0n1p2  vg_data lvm2 a--    1024.00m   1024.00m

$ sudo vgs
  VG      #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize  VFree
  vg_data   2   0   0 wz--n-  1.99g  1.99g

Your partition names may differ, but they should be the two LVM-ready partitions created on the extra practice disk.

Summary

In this challenge, you have learned how to initialize block devices as LVM physical volumes and how to aggregate them into a volume group. These are the foundational steps for implementing a flexible storage solution with LVM on a RHEL system. By completing this challenge, you have gained practical experience that is crucial for advanced storage management tasks.