pvmove(8) — Linux manual page
PVMOVE(8) System Manager's Manual PVMOVE(8)
NAME
pvmove — Move extents from one physical volume to another
SYNOPSIS
pvmove position_args
[ option_args ]
[ position_args ]
DESCRIPTION
pvmove moves the allocated physical extents (PEs) on a source PV
to one or more destination PVs. You can optionally specify a
source LV in which case only extents used by that LV will be
moved to free (or specified) extents on the destination PV. If no
destination PV is specified, the normal allocation rules for the
VG are used.
If pvmove is interrupted for any reason (e.g. the machine
crashes) then run pvmove again without any PV arguments to
restart any operations that were in progress from the last
checkpoint. Alternatively, use the abort option at any time to
abort the operation. The resulting location of LVs after an abort
depends on whether the atomic option was used.
More than one pvmove can run concurrently if they are moving data
from different source PVs, but additional pvmoves will ignore any
LVs already in the process of being changed, so some data might
not get moved.
USAGE
Move PV extents.
pvmove PV
[ -A|--autobackup y|n ]
[ -n|--name LV ]
[ --alloc contiguous|cling|cling_by_tags|normal|anywhere|
inherit ]
[ --atomic ]
[ --noudevsync ]
[ --reportformat basic|json ]
[ COMMON_OPTIONS ]
[ PV ... ]
Continue or abort existing pvmove operations.
pvmove
[ COMMON_OPTIONS ]
Common options for command:
[ -b|--background ]
[ -i|--interval Number ]
[ --abort ]
Common options for lvm:
[ -d|--debug ]
[ -h|--help ]
[ -q|--quiet ]
[ -t|--test ]
[ -v|--verbose ]
[ -y|--yes ]
[ --commandprofile String ]
[ --config String ]
[ --devices PV ]
[ --devicesfile String ]
[ --driverloaded y|n ]
[ --journal String ]
[ --lockopt String ]
[ --longhelp ]
[ --nohints ]
[ --nolocking ]
[ --profile String ]
[ --version ]
OPTIONS
--abort
Abort any pvmove operations in progress. If a pvmove was
started with the --atomic option, then all LVs will remain
on the source PV. Otherwise, segments that have been
moved will remain on the destination PV, while unmoved
segments will remain on the source PV.
--alloc contiguous|cling|cling_by_tags|normal|anywhere|inherit
Determines the allocation policy when a command needs to
allocate Physical Extents (PEs) from the VG. Each VG and
LV has an allocation policy which can be changed with
vgchange/lvchange, or overridden on the command line.
normal applies common sense rules such as not placing par‐
allel stripes on the same PV. inherit applies the VG pol‐
icy to an LV. contiguous requires new PEs be placed adja‐
cent to existing PEs. cling places new PEs on the same PV
as existing PEs in the same stripe of the LV. If there
are sufficient PEs for an allocation, but normal does not
use them, anywhere will use them even if it reduces per‐
formance, e.g. by placing two stripes on the same PV. Op‐
tional positional PV args on the command line can also be
used to limit which PVs the command will use for alloca‐
tion. See lvm(8) for more information about allocation.
--atomic
Makes a pvmove operation atomic, ensuring that all affect‐
ed LVs are moved to the destination PV, or none are if the
operation is aborted.
-A|--autobackup y|n
Specifies if metadata should be backed up automatically
after a change. Enabling this is strongly advised! See
vgcfgbackup(8) for more information.
-b|--background
If the operation requires polling, this option causes the
command to return before the operation is complete, and
polling is done in the background.
--commandprofile String
The command profile to use for command configuration. See
lvm.conf(5) for more information about profiles.
--config String
Config settings for the command. These override
lvm.conf(5) settings. The String arg uses the same format
as lvm.conf(5), or may use section/field syntax. See
lvm.conf(5) for more information about config.
-d|--debug ...
Set debug level. Repeat from 1 to 6 times to increase the
detail of messages sent to the log file and/or syslog (if
configured).
--devices PV
Devices that the command can use. This option can be re‐
peated or accepts a comma separated list of devices. This
overrides the devices file.
--devicesfile String
A file listing devices that LVM should use. The file must
exist in /etc/lvm/devices/ and is managed with the
lvmdevices(8) command. This overrides the lvm.conf(5) de‐
vices/devicesfile and devices/use_devicesfile settings.
--driverloaded y|n
If set to no, the command will not attempt to use device-
mapper. For testing and debugging.
-h|--help
Display help text.
-i|--interval Number
Report progress at regular intervals.
--journal String
Record information in the systemd journal. This informa‐
tion is in addition to information enabled by the lvm.conf
log/journal setting. command: record information about
the command. output: record the default command output.
debug: record full command debugging.
--lockopt String
Used to pass options for special cases to lvmlockd. See
lvmlockd(8) for more information.
--longhelp
Display long help text.
-n|--name String
Move only the extents belonging to the named LV.
--nohints
Do not use the hints file to locate devices for PVs. A
command may read more devices to find PVs when hints are
not used. The command will still perform standard hint
file invalidation where appropriate.
--nolocking
Disable locking.
--noudevsync
Disables udev synchronisation. The process will not wait
for notification from udev. It will continue irrespective
of any possible udev processing in the background. Only
use this if udev is not running or has rules that ignore
the devices LVM creates.
--profile String
An alias for --commandprofile or --metadataprofile, de‐
pending on the command.
-q|--quiet ...
Suppress output and log messages. Overrides --debug and
--verbose. Repeat once to also suppress any prompts with
answer 'no'.
--reportformat basic|json
Overrides current output format for reports which is de‐
fined globally by the report/output_format setting in
lvm.conf(5). basic is the original format with columns
and rows. If there is more than one report per command,
each report is prefixed with the report name for identifi‐
cation. json produces report output in JSON format. See
lvmreport(7) for more information.
-t|--test
Run in test mode. Commands will not update metadata. This
is implemented by disabling all metadata writing but nev‐
ertheless returning success to the calling function. This
may lead to unusual error messages in multi-stage opera‐
tions if a tool relies on reading back metadata it be‐
lieves has changed but hasn't.
-v|--verbose ...
Set verbose level. Repeat from 1 to 4 times to increase
the detail of messages sent to stdout and stderr.
--version
Display version information.
-y|--yes
Do not prompt for confirmation interactively but always
assume the answer yes. Use with extreme caution. (For au‐
tomatic no, see -qq.)
VARIABLES
PV Physical Volume name, a device path under /dev. For com‐
mands managing physical extents, a PV positional arg gen‐
erally accepts a suffix indicating a range (or multiple
ranges) of physical extents (PEs). When the first PE is
omitted, it defaults to the start of the device, and when
the last PE is omitted it defaults to end. Start and end
range (inclusive): PV[:PE-PE]... Start and length range
(counting from 0): PV[:PE+PE]...
String See the option description for information about the
string content.
Size[UNIT]
Size is an input number that accepts an optional unit.
Input units are always treated as base two values, regard‐
less of capitalization, e.g. 'k' and 'K' both refer to
1024. The default input unit is specified by letter, fol‐
lowed by |UNIT. UNIT represents other possible input
units: b|B is bytes, s|S is sectors of 512 bytes, k|K is
KiB, m|M is MiB, g|G is GiB, t|T is TiB, p|P is PiB, e|E
is EiB. (This should not be confused with the output con‐
trol --units, where capital letters mean multiple of
1000.)
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
See lvm(8) for information about environment variables used by
lvm. For example, LVM_VG_NAME can generally be substituted for a
required VG parameter.
NOTES
pvmove works as follows:
1. A temporary 'pvmove' LV is created to store details of all the
data movements required.
2. Every LV in the VG is searched for contiguous data that need
moving according to the command line arguments. For each piece
of data found, a new segment is added to the end of the pvmove
LV. This segment takes the form of a temporary mirror to copy
the data from the original location to a newly allocated loca‐
tion. The original LV is updated to use the new temporary mirror
segment in the pvmove LV instead of accessing the data directly.
3. The VG metadata is updated on disk.
4. The first segment of the pvmove LV is activated and starts to
mirror the first part of the data. Only one segment is mirrored
at once as this is usually more efficient.
5. A daemon repeatedly checks progress at the specified time in‐
terval. When it detects that the first temporary mirror is in
sync, it breaks that mirror so that only the new location for
that data gets used and writes a checkpoint into the VG metadata
on disk. Then it activates the mirror for the next segment of
the pvmove LV.
6. When there are no more segments left to be mirrored, the tem‐
porary LV is removed and the VG metadata is updated so that the
LVs reflect the new data locations.
Note that this new process cannot support the original LVM1 type
of on-disk metadata. Metadata can be converted using
vgconvert(8).
If the --atomic option is used, a slightly different approach is
used for the move. Again, a temporary 'pvmove' LV is created to
store the details of all the data movements required. This tem‐
porary LV contains all the segments of the various LVs that need
to be moved. However, in this case, an identical LV is allocated
that contains the same number of segments and a mirror is created
to copy the contents from the first temporary LV to the second.
After a complete copy is made, the temporary LVs are removed,
leaving behind the segments on the destination PV. If an abort
is issued during the move, all LVs being moved will remain on the
source PV.
EXAMPLES
Move all physical extents that are used by simple LVs on the
specified PV to free physical extents elsewhere in the VG.
pvmove /dev/sdb1
Use a specific destination PV when moving physical extents.
pvmove /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
Move extents belonging to a single LV.
pvmove -n lvol1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
Rather than moving the contents of an entire device, it is possi‐
ble to move a range of physical extents, for example numbers 1000
to 1999 inclusive on the specified PV.
pvmove /dev/sdb1:1000-1999
A range of physical extents to move can be specified as
start+length. For example, starting from PE 1000. (Counting
starts from 0, so this refers to the 1001st to the 2000th PE in‐
clusive.)
pvmove /dev/sdb1:1000+1000
Move a range of physical extents to a specific PV (which must
have sufficient free extents).
pvmove /dev/sdb1:1000-1999 /dev/sdc1
Move a range of physical extents to specific new extents on a new
PV.
pvmove /dev/sdb1:1000-1999 /dev/sdc1:0-999
If the source and destination are on the same disk, the anywhere
allocation policy is needed.
pvmove --alloc anywhere /dev/sdb1:1000-1999 /dev/sdb1:0-999
The part of a specific LV present within in a range of physical
extents can also be picked out and moved.
pvmove -n lvol1 /dev/sdb1:1000-1999 /dev/sdc1
SEE ALSO
lvm(8), lvm.conf(5), lvmconfig(8), lvmdevices(8),
pvchange(8), pvck(8), pvcreate(8), pvdisplay(8), pvmove(8),
pvremove(8), pvresize(8), pvs(8), pvscan(8),
vgcfgbackup(8), vgcfgrestore(8), vgchange(8), vgck(8),
vgcreate(8), vgconvert(8), vgdisplay(8), vgexport(8),
vgextend(8), vgimport(8), vgimportclone(8), vgimportdevices(8),
vgmerge(8), vgmknodes(8), vgreduce(8), vgremove(8), vgrename(8),
vgs(8), vgscan(8), vgsplit(8),
lvcreate(8), lvchange(8), lvconvert(8), lvdisplay(8),
lvextend(8), lvreduce(8), lvremove(8), lvrename(8), lvresize(8),
lvs(8), lvscan(8),
lvm-fullreport(8), lvm-lvpoll(8), blkdeactivate(8), lvmdump(8),
dmeventd(8), lvmpolld(8), lvmlockd(8), lvmlockctl(8),
cmirrord(8), lvmdbusd(8), fsadm(8),
lvmsystemid(7), lvmreport(7), lvmcache(7), lvmraid(7),
lvmthin(7), lvmvdo(7), lvmautoactivation(7)
COLOPHON
This page is part of the lvm2 (Logical Volume Manager 2) project.
Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://www.sourceware.org/lvm2/⟩. If you have a bug report for
this manual page, see ⟨https://github.com/lvmteam/lvm2/issues⟩.
This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://sourceware.org/git/lvm2.git⟩ on 2024-06-14. (At that
time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2024-06-11.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Red Hat, Inc. LVM TOOLS 2.03.25(2)-git (2024-05-16) PVMOVE(8)
Pages that refer to this page: lvchange(8), lvconvert(8), lvcreate(8), lvdisplay(8), lvextend(8), lvm(8), lvmconfig(8), lvmdevices(8), lvmdiskscan(8), lvm-fullreport(8), lvm-lvpoll(8), lvreduce(8), lvremove(8), lvrename(8), lvresize(8), lvs(8), lvscan(8), pvchange(8), pvck(8), pvcreate(8), pvdisplay(8), pvmove(8), pvremove(8), pvresize(8), pvs(8), pvscan(8), vgcfgbackup(8), vgcfgrestore(8), vgchange(8), vgck(8), vgconvert(8), vgcreate(8), vgdisplay(8), vgexport(8), vgextend(8), vgimport(8), vgimportclone(8), vgimportdevices(8), vgmerge(8), vgmknodes(8), vgreduce(8), vgremove(8), vgrename(8), vgs(8), vgscan(8), vgsplit(8)