Hi all, I’m playing around with LVMs to expand data storage and I’m looking at what would be required to transfer those drives to another device, all the steps I can find require exporting the volume group and then importing on the other device. But what would be the case if your boot drive were to fail, and you needed to move the drives without being able to export the volume group. Can you just do an import with a new device, or are there other steps required to do so?
Secondly, is there a benefit to creating an LVM volume with a btrfs filesystem vs just letting btrfs handle it?
I did not find just moving the drives to work. There were some other issues that I came across that might have a part to play in it, I made the lvm and filesystem on an RPI5 running OMV and moved it to a rock3c running OMV from an armbian install. Turns out there’s a pagefile size mismatch between the two that prevented mounting the btrfs filesystem. But I still wasn’t able to get the rock3c to recognize the VG or that there were new PVs attached without exporting first. So perhaps the armbian install isn’t modern enough to automatically recognize it.
I didn’t expect learning new things about btrfs to be the outcome of this little experiment, but I guess that’s just how things work.
I haven’t tested lvm on arm-based systems, but if it doesn’t automatically locate them you could try pvscan/vgscan/lvscan.