LVM – Deleting a Physical Volume

Overview

By the end of this article you should be able to answer the following questions:

There will be times when you want to decommission a block device (e.g. hdd). To do this you first need to delete any physical volumes that is the hdd houses. One of the big advantages of lvm is that you can delete these physical volumes without needing to unmount any filesystems.

Let's say we want to remove the the /dev/sdb device and it comprises of only one primary partition (/dev/sdb1) which is being using as physical volume. Lets also assume that this physical volume is assigned to the volume group vgdata1vg. Now before we can delete the physical volume we first have to ensure that the volume group it is assigned to has enough capacity to carry on after losing the physical volume, if not then add a another physical volume to it from another block device.

After that you have to move date out of the /dev/sdb1 redistribute it to all the other physical volumes in the volume group, this is done by running the following command:

$ pvmove /dev/sdb1    # this can take a few seconds to run

Now we can remove this physical volume from vgdata1vg by running the following command:

$ vgreduce vgdata1vg /dev/sdb1