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Tutul
Asked: 2012-10-30 00:43:11 +0800 CST

Moving /var from LVM to a non-LVM disk

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I inherited an LVM based centos setup where root is at an LVM partiton. I want to move my /var to a new harddisk without adding it to the LVM group. Is it possible to mount the new harddisk to /var without adding it to the LVM, like adding it to fstab directly?

linux

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    What you want to do is certainly doable offline. LVM certainly makes it easy to do the data move online, but depending on your situation you may be able to do it online even without LVM.

    The online and offline process is essentially the same when not using LVM.

    Offline operation

    If you are okay with taking the machine offline for a while, I would recommend booting from a live media (I would recommend SystemRescueCd), then prepare the disk for the new /var partition (partition it and prepare a file system for it), mount both the LVM based /var and the newly formatted /var, and then copy all the data from the one disk to the other (rsync is my recommendation here).

    You would then have to update your /etc/fstab and you are set.

    If you do not want to boot in a live media, you may have some luck booting in single user mode. Or, you can just bite the bullet and try to do it online.

    Online operation

    The procedure when moving the data online is pretty much the same as the offline procedure, but you have to additionally be very careful about any processes that use the old /var partition. If there is nothing critical on it, you don't have to be so careful, and a final reboot will take care of the leftovers.

    The procedure

    1. Partition the new disk and prepare the new filesystem
    2. Mount the /var-to-be filesystem somewhere (I will assume /mnt/newvar for simplicity)
    3. Copy all files from /var to /mnt/newvar (rsync -avHPSAX /var/ /mnt/newvar/)
    4. Check what processes hold any open files in /var and stop them (lsof -n / | awk '$9 ~ /^\/var\//' will let you know)
    5. sync the disks again (rsync -avHP --delete /var/ /mnt/newvar/). This should be fast as there will hardly be any updates
    6. When you are sure that nothing is writing to /var, umount /mnt/newvar and mount it on /var
    7. Update /etc/fstab
    8. Reboot
    9. After the reboot you can delete the volume that used to be /var. If your /var was not a separate volume and is just part of /, then you can mount -o bind / /mnt, and clean up /mnt/var (remember to keep /mnt/var as it is the mountpoint).

    If you need more details, you would have to short more information about your setup, like the output of df -hTP /var, lvm lvs, and fdisk -l for the new disk that you want to use.

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