If you have enough free extents on the other disks in the volume group, you have it easy. Simply run
<div style="border: 1px solid # A3B1BF; padding: .5em 1em; color: #000; background-color: #E6F2FF; margin: 3px 3px 1em 3px;">pvmove /dev/hdb
pvmove -- moving physical extents in active volume group "dev"
pvmove -- WARNING: moving of active logical volumes may cause data loss!
pvmove -- do you want to continue? [y/n] y
pvmove -- 249 extents of physical volume "/dev/hdb" successfully moved
</div>
This will move the allocated physical extents from /dev/hdb onto the rest of the disks in the volume group.
We can now remove the old IDE disk from the volume group.
<div style="border: 1px solid # A3B1BF; padding: .5em 1em; color: #000; background-color: #E6F2FF; margin: 3px 3px 1em 3px;"> vgreduce dev /dev/hdb
vgreduce -- doing automatic backup of volume group "dev"
vgreduce -- volume group "dev" successfully reduced by physical volume:
vgreduce -- /dev/hdb
</div>
The drive can now be either physically removed when the machine is next powered down or reallocated to other users.
First, you need to pvcreate the new disk to make it available to LVM. In this recipe we show that you don't need to partition a disk to be able to use it.
<div style="border: 1px solid # A3B1BF; padding: .5em 1em; color: #000; background-color: #E6F2FF; margin: 3px 3px 1em 3px;"> pvcreate /dev/sdf
pvcreate -- physical volume "/dev/sdf" successfully created
</div>
13.5.2.2. Add it to the volume group
As developers use a lot of disk space this is a good volume group to add it into.
<div style="border: 1px solid # A3B1BF; padding: .5em 1em; color: #000; background-color: #E6F2FF; margin: 3px 3px 1em 3px;"> vgextend dev /dev/sdf
vgextend -- INFO: maximum logical volume size is 255.99 Gigabyte
vgextend -- doing automatic backup of volume group "dev"
vgextend -- volume group "dev" successfully extended
</div>
13.5.2.3. Move the data
Next we move the data from the old disk onto the new one. Note that it is not necessary to unmount the file system before doing this. Although it is *highly* recommended that you do a full backup before attempting this operation in case of a power outage or some other problem that may interrupt it. The pvmove command can take a considerable amount of time to complete and it also exacts a performance hit on the two volumes so, although it isn't necessary, it is advisable to do this when the volumes are not too busy.
<div style="border: 1px solid # A3B1BF; padding: .5em 1em; color: #000; background-color: #E6F2FF; margin: 3px 3px 1em 3px;"> pvmove /dev/hdb /dev/sdf
pvmove -- moving physical extents in active volume group "dev"
pvmove -- WARNING: moving of active logical volumes may cause data loss!
pvmove -- do you want to continue? [y/n] y
pvmove -- 249 extents of physical volume "/dev/hdb" successfully moved
</div>
13.5.2.4. Remove the unused disk
We can now remove the old IDE disk from the volume group.
<div style="border: 1px solid # A3B1BF; padding: .5em 1em; color: #000; background-color: #E6F2FF; margin: 3px 3px 1em 3px;"> vgreduce dev /dev/hdb
vgreduce -- doing automatic backup of volume group "dev"
vgreduce -- volume group "dev" successfully reduced by physical volume:
vgreduce -- /dev/hdb
</div>
The drive can now be either physically removed when the machine is next powered down or reallocated to some other users.