Configure Thin Provision LVM using kickstart with example in CentOS/RHEL 7/8

In this article I will share the steps to configure thin provision LVM using kickstart with examples for RHEL 7 and RHEL 8, also validated on CentOS 7. Now at the time of writing this article CentOS 8 was not released but assuming on the RHEL 8 distribution, the example should also work on CentOS 8.

What are Thin Provisioned LVM?

In simple terms, “thin provisioning” is a way of managing storage in computers where you tell the system to pretend it has more space than it really does. This can be useful when you want to make sure you have enough space for multiple applications or users without buying a lot of hard drives upfront.

Let’s say you have a bookshelf that’s only big enough for 10 books, but you promise 20 friends they can each keep a book on it. In reality, you know not all friends will bring their book at the same time, so you can manage with the space you have. Thin provisioning in a computer’s storage works similarly.

LVM stands for Logical Volume Management, which is a way of dividing up the space on your hard drives more flexibly than the traditional method of partitions. With LVM, you can create “volumes” that look like regular hard drives to your system, but they can be resized or moved around much more easily.

When you combine thin provisioning with LVM, you get “thin provisioned LVM.” This allows you to create a logical volume that seems to have more space than is actually available on the physical hard drives. Here’s how it’s beneficial:

In my older articles I have shared various examples to perform PXE installation using kickstart with different storage and network layouts.

Configure Thin Provision LVM

To configure thin provision LVM, a thin pool LV must be created before thin LV’s can be created within it.

A thin pool LV is created by combining two standard LV’s:

• a large data LV that will hold blocks for thin LVs, and
• a metadata LV that will hold metadata.

The metadata tracks which data blocks belong to each thin LV.

Sample Kickstart File Example

In my example I have a single disk “sda” on which I plan to configure thin provision LVM using a kickstart based installation. Now the below snippet only contains a section of kickstart file. You can refer my other article to get a snippet of complete sample kickstart configuration file.

# System bootloader configuration
bootloader --location=mbr --driveorder=sda --append="rhgb novga console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0"

# Partition clearing information
clearpart --all --initlabel --drives=sda

# Disk partitioning information
part pv.746 --fstype="lvmpv" --ondisk=sda --size=1 --grow
part /boot --fstype="ext4" --ondisk=sda --size=512
part swap --fstype="swap" --ondisk=sda --size=4096
volgroup rhel --pesize=4096 pv.746
logvol none  --fstype="None" --size=1 --grow --thinpool --metadatasize=4 --chunksize=65536 --name=pool00 --vgname=rhel
logvol /  --fstype="ext4" --size=40960 --thin --poolname=pool00 --name=root --vgname=rhel
logvol /home  --fstype="ext4" --size=20480 --thin --poolname=pool00 --name=home --vgname=rhel
logvol swap  --fstype="swap" --size=4096 --thin --poolname=pool00 --name=swap --vgname=rhel

In this example

• We create a physical volume pv.746 on our disk /dev/sda. Now since we do not know the size of the disk, we will use --grow argument so it will take all the space available for the pool.
• The /boot partition cannot be a part of logical volume so we create it as a separate standard partition
• Create a volume group “rhel”
• Create thin provision LVM “thinpool”
• Create a swap and other partition under thinpool with pre-defined size

Chunk size

The size of data blocks managed by a thin pool can be specified with the--chunksizeoption when the thin pool LV is created. The default unit is kilobytes and the default value is 64KiB. The value must be a power of two between 4KiB and 1GiB.
When a thin pool is used primarily for the thin provisioning feature, a larger value is optimal. To optimise for a lot of snapshotting, a smaller value reduces copying time and consumes less space.

Size of pool metadata LV

The amount of thin metadata depends on how many blocks are shared between thin LVs (i.e. through snapshots). A thin pool with many snapshots may need a larger metadata LV. When a command automatically creates a thin metadata LV, the--poolmetadatasizeoption can be used specify a non-default size. The default unit is megabytes.

Once the installation is successful, validate the available partition using df command

rhel-8:~ # df -h
Filesystem             Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/rhel-root   40G  1.8G   36G   5% /
devtmpfs                63G     0   63G   0% /dev
tmpfs                  2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                  500M  9.7M  491M   2% /run
tmpfs                   63G     0   63G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1              488M  127M  326M  28% /boot
/dev/mapper/rhel-home   20G   45M   19G   1% /home
tmpfs                  100M     0  100M   0% /run/user/1000
tmpfs                  1.0M  4.0K 1020K   1% /opt/sdf/queues
tmpfs                  100M     0  100M   0% /run/user/1003
tmpfs                  100M     0  100M   0% /run/user/1006

Check the available logical volumes. You can see our thinpool also configured as logical volume but with all the free space.

rhel-8:~ # lvs
  LV     VG   Attr       LSize    Pool   Origin Data%  Meta%  Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert
  home   rhel Vwi-aotz-- 20.00g   pool00        8.12
  pool00 rhel twi-aotz-- <1.09t                 0.70   11.13
  root   rhel Vwi-aotz-- 40.00g   pool00        15.47
  swap   rhel Vwi-aotz-- 4096.00m pool00        0.01

Check the available physical volume.

rhel-8:~ # pvs
  PV         VG   Fmt  Attr PSize  PFree
  /dev/sda3  rhel lvm2 a--  <1.09t    0

Check the available volume group.

rhel-8:~ # vgs
  VG   #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize  VFree
  rhel   1   3   0 wz--n- <1.09t    0

Lastly I hope the steps from the article to Configure Thin provision LVM using kickstart in CentOS/RHEL 7/8 Linux was helpful. So, let me know your suggestions and feedback using the comment section.