Purely theoretical right now, but wonering if it’s possible to replace some physical drives on my dell R750xs, fully loaded with 8 drives, with at least one (for now) NVMe drive. The NVMe drive(s) would, I’m sure, need to be a new volume group of its own.
Only one $tiny$little$thing$ standing in the way, naturally. But I’m thinking I’d have to figure out which drives are in what volume group. Maybe shrink the volume group and figure out how to free up one specific physical drive so it can be yanked out and replaced.
I’m perhaps 6 months or more away from taking this serously, and even wondering if I should just start over with a new server since this one is 3.5 years old and will be 4 by the time I get around to it..
Not looking for step-by-step instructions, just wondering if I’m on the right track.
Only SAS/SATA drives can be used. To add NVMe requires a new backplate
There are vacant NVMe slots already and NVMe drive can be simply added
The default filesystem is XFS. One cannot shrink XFS. Therefore, you would have to first (backup and) remove some LV if they all have XFS.
pvdisplay shows how much of each PV is allocated to LVs.
One can pvmove extents of LV to different PV (if other PV have free PE).
With these on could reach one PV (drive) totally free (unused).
However, if you have used the PERC to configure the drives into an array, then each physical drive is/has not a separate PV.
If you can add NVMe without removal of HDD, then you could make it PV, add to the existing VG, and pvmove (parts of/some) LV to the SSD. (Even then you do want to have a backup.)
