The Problem
When installing Ubuntu Server with the LVM option in the default partitioning options, it will often only use a fraction of the actual disk space you have available. Thankfully LVM is flexible enough to extend this partition without causing any huge issues to your operating system. In this writeup, I’m gonna extend a 15G volume to a 200G volume on my Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS VM.
user@ubuntu:~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0 7:0 0 55M 1 loop /snap/core18/1880
loop1 7:1 0 55.7M 1 loop /snap/core18/2812
loop2 7:2 0 63.9M 1 loop /snap/core20/2105
loop3 7:3 0 74.1M 1 loop /snap/core22/1033
loop4 7:4 0 71.3M 1 loop /snap/lxd/16099
loop5 7:5 0 91.8M 1 loop /snap/lxd/24061
loop6 7:6 0 40.9M 1 loop /snap/snapd/20290
sda 8:0 0 200G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1M 0 part
├─sda2 8:2 0 1G 0 part /boot
└─sda3 8:3 0 199G 0 part
└─ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv 253:0 0 15G 0 lvm /
sr0 11:0 1 4.5G 0 rom
user@ubuntu:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 794M 1.7M 793M 1% /run
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv 15G 14G 497M 97% /
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
/dev/sda2 974M 223M 684M 25% /boot
tmpfs 794M 16K 794M 1% /run/user/1000
The Fix
First, let’s ensure that our physical volume is correctly sized, this command won’t really do much if it is, but ts worth running just to be sure.