Dne 14.2.2014 20:21, Jeremy Smith napsal(a):
I have a system currently using LVM2 that was originally set up on
RHEL5 (where thin provisioning was not supported).
This system would greatly benefit from the newer thin provisioning
features, and so I am investigating upgrading to RHEL6 so that I may
take advantage. My question is this: Can I convert existing LVM2
"thick" logical volumes into thinly-provisioned volumes on the fly?
This page:
https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Logical_Volume_Manager_Administration/thinly_provisioned_volume_creation.html
lead me to believe that it is possible:
"You can use the --thinpool parameter of the lvconvert command to
convert an existing logical volume to a thin volume."
with the following:
lvconvert --thinpool vg001/lv1 --poolmetadata vg001/lv2
Sounds like misunderstanding which needs fix/enhancement of this doc page -
we will need to enhance lvconvert command to write big warning about this
operation.
This conversion is converting volume to 'data' volume - but it's not about
preserving content of LV1 as LV1 - it will serve as en empty pool.
The primary purpose is - you can build 'any' type of LV for data volume
and 'any' type of LV for metadata volume (i.e. special layout for raid/mirror)
and then you 'create' for these 2 volumes your thin pool - since normally
you can't create mirrored data & metadata volumes and thin pool in 1 command,
and you can't easily select where the metadata should be placed
(i.e. data on spindle, metadata on SSD).
Am I doing something wrong here?
Or am I going to have to create a new thin pool, new thin logical
volumes, and copy the data over?
There is not yet support for direct conversion of LV to thin-LV.
The only currently supported method is to use your thick-LV as an external
origin LV for your thin-LV volume.
i.e. you create your thin-pool LV + and then thin-LV volume with external
origin that will use original thick-LV (external origin need to be read-only
volume)
Here are the conversion steps:
lvcreate -Lsize_of_data_pool -T vg/pool
lvconvert -T vg/thick_LV --originname new_thick_LV_name --thinpool vg/pool
Disadvantage here is you cannot merge changes from thin volume back to
original thick volume. You can however remove thin-LV and use again your
thick-LV as normal volume - i.e. thin-LV is basically snapshot.
Now hint for recovery - if you have not yet written anything to thin-LV from
newly create thin-pool. You could restore back to your previous configuration
via vgcfgrestore --force.
Zdenek
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