My first post, might as well start with a doozy... Apologies if you get bogged down in too much detail.

We have and IBM Blade Center, with some blades running Oracle on RHEL4u4. Attached to the blade center are a couple of IBM storage units, (DS4700 and DS4300), on redundant fiber. The blade is running RDAC to sort out failover. The result of this is, when I create a logical drive on the DS4300, I see a single device at the blade, (/dev/sdb1), ready for all the standard Linux commands like fdisk, pvcreate, mke2fs, lvcreate, (you get the idea).

So, here's my problem. I created a logical drive with 200 GB of space available. Initially, I allocated 100 GB, which can be seen by the server. Using fdisk, I created a partition, (Linux LVM), using all the space I could see. I then created the requisite physical volume, volume group, logical volume, and ext3 file system on top of that. No problem, so far.

As file systems do, this one began to fill up, so I went to the IBM Storage Manager Client and increased the size of the logical drive, adding some of that reserve of extra disk space. When I execute:

# fdisk -l

I can see the extra space, it's there.

IBM was nice enough to include on line instructions on how to increase the size of everything PROVIDED you started with an ext2 or ext3 file system at the bottom of the chain. I didn't do that, I started with LVM physical volumes. (I wanted the option of increasing the size of the file system on the fly when there was space available.

Before you ask, "why don't you call IBM and ask them", I'm sad to say that our maintenance contract has expired, and while I hope it is renewed soon, it won't be for a while.

I have commands like /sbin/parted and /user/sbin/mppBusRescan, at my disposal, but since this is a production machine, I would just as soon get some insight from those who might have actually done this before diving in. Maybe you didn't let your support expire like we did. :-(

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Jeff

Hi,

you can do it in 2 ways.

Create a new partition or resize the old. This can sometimes a little bit tricky because the kernel does not remember partition size changes on the fly. Use pvcreate to create a physical volume on this, add them to the logical volume and use lvextend to extend the volume.

Or you can take a look at EVMS.