Centos – Shrink a mounted LVM partition

centoslvmpartitionredhat

I fear I already know the answer to this question, but here goes.

I need to carve out a new partition on a running system. /var/ is mounted from an LVM volume (hdd1_vg-var) and has only 3% used disk space.

/ is mounted separately (hdd1_vg-root) and has about 80% used disk space.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/**/hdd1_vg-root
                      2.0G  1.4G  481M  75% /
/dev/**/hdd1_vg-var
                       33G  699M   31G   3% /var

Unfortunately I don't have any free extents to grow this partition organically – vgdisplay shows:

  Total PE              10000
  Alloc PE / Size       10000 / 39.06 GB
  Free  PE / Size       0 / 0

So seeing that I have all this free disk space on /var/, can I shrink /var/ without un-mounting it or is this just a pipe dream?

I am really hoping to be able to do this work on a running system – un-mounting would of course not be difficult but it would interfere with system functionality.

Best Answer

Yes, you can shrink/move/grow an online root partition without any reboots (nor livecd, nor usbkey): consult this answer. It's very well written and easy to follow, although quite long and a little risky.

This allows to bypass limitation of resize2fs not being able to shrink ext4 partitions.

Of course, if you only want to grow your ext4 partition, you can stick to the conventional working resize2fs solutions.

The general solution I've lnked will work on any type of dedicated or VPS solution for instance.

TLDR; this solution implies to pivot_root to tmpfs so you can umount safely your root partition live and fiddle with it. Once done, you'll pivot_root back on your new root partition.

This allows pretty much any manipulation on the root file system (move it, change filesystem, changing it's physical device...).

I have personally used this, and it works very well on debian system also, but the guide was initially written in 2007 for redhat, the answer I've linked was updated for CentOS7. It's highly probable that it'll work on your CentOS6.

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