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ndemou
Asked: 2016-11-19 07:18:53 +0800 CST

Tool to visualize linux block devices (partitions, LVM PVs, LVs, mdadm devices...)

  • 772

I'm looking for a tool that will scan my GUI-less server and create an easy to digest rough overview of all the block devices and their relationship (disk partitions, mdadm devices, LVM PVs & LVs etc) in some rich visual format (html, pdf, svg, png...).

Here's a simple example visualization:

    +--------+---------------------+ +-------------------+
    | sda1   |                     | |       sdc1        |
    +--------+---------------------+ +-------------------+
        +               +                      +
    +--------+---------------------+ +-------------------+
    | sdb1   |                     | |       sdd1        |
    +--------+---------------------+ +-------------------+
        |               |                      |
        v               v                      v
    +---+---+ +---------+----------+ +--------+----------+
    |  md0  | |        md1         | |       md2         |
    +-------+ +---------+----------+ +--------+----------+
    | /boot |                    \     /
      ext4                        \   /
                                   \ /
                                    +
                                    |
                                    v
              +------------------------------------------+
              |                vgmain                    |
              +------+-----------------+-----------------+
              |/root |  /home          |   /var          |
                ext4    btrfs              ext4

I don't need detail (I can get that from the CLI tools like lsbls, fdisk, mdadm, pvdisplay, lvdisplay, df)

hard-drive linux block-device visualization

2 Answers

  1. Your best friend here is a simple lsblk command. It will give you an output similar to that:

    [root@somehost ~]# lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
vda    252:0    0  7.8G  0 disk
├─vda1 252:1    0  6.9G  0 part /
└─vda2 252:2    0  999M  0 part [SWAP]

    For more information, feel free to read its excellent man page

    • 0

  2. Perhaps you've already used it, but the du command can be used with the --max-depth=1 parameter to understand how the used space is distribuited in the file system tree, for example:

    root@server:/# du --max-depth=1 -h .|sort -h
0       ./dev
0       ./proc
0       ./sys
4.0K    ./boot
4.0K    ./lib64
4.0K    ./media
4.0K    ./srv
28K     ./tmp
5.0M    ./etc
5.1M    ./sbin
9.9M    ./bin
30M     ./home
33M     ./run
44M     ./lib
1.2G    ./var
1.4G    ./opt
2.1G    ./usr
3.9G    ./root
8.6G    .

    In this way you can visually recognize where most of the data are, change into that directory and recursively reuse the du command to find where you can free some data.

    • -1