35. Adding a New Disk to an Ubuntu Volume Group and Logical Volume

In the previous chapter we looked at adding a new disk drive to an Ubuntu system, creating a partition and file system and then mounting that file system so that the disk can be accessed. An alternative to creating fixed partitions and file systems is to use Logical Volume Management (LVM) to create logical disks made up of space from one or more physical or virtual disks or partitions. The advantage of using LVM is that space can be added to or removed from logical volumes as needed without the need to spread data over multiple file systems.

Let us take, for example, the root (/) file system of an Ubuntu-based server. Without LVM this file system would be created with a certain size when the operating system is installed. If a new disk drive is installed there is no way to allocate any of that space to the / file system. The only option would be to create new file systems on the new disk and mount them at particular...