Resizing a Logical Volume holding a live virt guest

Question

I've got a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.5 (Tikanga). That I'm running four virtual guests on. In /dev/VolGroup01 I have the following partitions
xenvm01 xenvm02 xenvm03

Then I have snapshots like so
vm01_backup vm02_backup vm03_backup

I'm wondering if there is any way for me to resize (grow) the LV /dev/VolGroup01/xenvm01 without first shutting down the virt. But it also seems as if I have to remove the snapshots before I can resize.

Answer 1

With a recent enough guest virtio kernel (2.6.38+ I think), the resized volume size will show through to the guest without a reboot or reattach. Otherwise, you have to restart the guest (or at least, xm block-detach/block-attach) to see the new space.

Answer 2

okay growing the lv was rather painless. So say I wanted to add 20 GB to the xenvm01 lv. as root I just type 'lvextend -L+20GB /dev/VolGroup01/xenvm01'this will add the 20 GB to the guest but as unallocated space. there is no filesystem and its not partitioned. (working on finding that solution now).