Automatically Extend LVM Snapshots

Snapshot logical volumes are a great way to save the state of an LV (a special block device) at a particular point in time. Essentially this provides the ability to snapshot block devices and then revert them back at a later date. In other words you can rest easy when that big upgrade comes along :)

This all seems fine and dandy until your snapshot runs out of space! Yep, the size of the snapshot does matter. Snapshot LVs are Copy-On-Write (COW) devices. Old blocks from the origin LV get “Copied” to the snapshot LV only when new blocks are “Written” to in the origin LV. Additionally, only the blocks that get written to in the origin LV get copied over to the snapshot LV.

Thus, you can make a snapshot LV much smaller than the origin LV and as long as the snapshot never fills up then you are fine. If it does fill up, then the snapshot is invalid and you can no longer use it.

The problem with this is the fact that it becomes quite tricky to determine how much space you actually need in your snapshot. If you notice that your snapshot is becoming full then you can use lvextend to increase the size of the snapshot, but this is not very desirable as it’s not automated and requires user intervention.

The good news is that recently there was an addition to lvm that allows for autoextension of snapshot LVs! The bugzilla report #427298 tracked the request and it has now been released in lvm2-2.02.84-1. The lvm-devel email from when the patch came through contains some good details on how to use the new functionality.

To summarize, you edit /etc/lvm/lvm.conf and set the snapshot_autoextend_threshold to something other than 100 (100 is the default value and also disables automatic extension). In addition, you also edit the snapshot_autoextend_percent. This value will be the amount you want to extend the snapshot LV.

To test this out I edited my /etc/lvm/lvm.conf file to have the following values:
\

    snapshot_autoextend_threshold = 80
    snapshot_autoextend_percent = 20


These values indicate that once the snapshot is 80% full then extend it’s size by 20%. To get the lvm monitoring to pick up the changes the lvm2-monitor service needs to be restarted (this varies by platform).

Now, lets test it out! We will create an LV, make a filesystem, mount it, and then snapshot the LV.
\

[root@F17 ~]#  lvcreate --size=1G --name=lv1 --addtag @lv1 vg1
  Logical volume "lv1" created
[root@F17 ~]#
[root@F17 ~]# mkfs.ext4 /dev/vg1/lv1 > /dev/null
mke2fs 1.42 (29-Nov-2011)
[root@F17 ~]#
[root@F17 ~]# mount /dev/vg1/lv1 /mnt/
[root@F17 ~]#
[root@F17 ~]# lvcreate --snapshot --size=500M --name=snap1 --addtag @lv1 /dev/vg1/lv1
  Logical volume "snap1" created
[root@F17 ~]#


Verify the snapshot was created by using lvs.
\

[root@F17 ~]# lvs -o lv_name,vg_name,lv_size,origin,snap_percent @lv1
  LV    VG   LSize   Origin Snap%
  lv1   vg1    1.00g
  snap1 vg1  500.00m lv1      0.00


Finally, I can test the snapshot autoextension. Since my snapshot is 500M in size let’s create a file that is ~420M in the origin LV. This will be just over 80% of the snapsphot size so it should get resized.
\

[root@F17 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/file bs=1M count=420
420+0 records in
420+0 records out
440401920 bytes (440 MB) copied, 134.326 s, 3.3 MB/s
[root@F17 ~]#
[root@F17 ~]# ls -lh /mnt/file
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 420M Mar  4 11:36 /mnt/file


A quick run of lvs reveals that the underlying monitoring code did it’s job and extended the LV by 20% to 600M!!
\

[root@F17 ~]# lvs -o lv_name,vg_name,lv_size,origin,snap_percent @lv1
  LV    VG   LSize   Origin Snap%
  lv1   vg1    1.00g
  snap1 vg1  600.00m lv1     70.29
[root@F17 ~]#



Dusty Mabe