Format and Mount a Logical Volume

Logical volumes act as physical drives. A newly created logical volume must be formatted and mounted to act as a physical drive. Using the Storage page in the web console, Cockpit administrators can format and mount a logical volume.

What Do You Need?

• The Cockpit web console must be installed and accessible.

  For details, see these topics: Install and Enable Cockpit and Log in to the Cockpit Web Console.

• The cockpit-storaged package must be installed.

  Note:

  If the cockpit-storaged package isn't installed, see this section Install and Manage Add-on Applications.

• A created logical volume on the host system. For details, see Create a Logical Volume.

• Administrator privileges.

Steps

Using the Cockpit web console, follow these steps to format and mount the file system of an existing logical volume.

1. In the Storage page, find the Devices table and select the volume group in which the logical volume exists.

   The LVM2 group [name] page appears.

2. In the LVM2 group [name] page, navigate to the Logical volumes table.
3. In the Logical volumes table, find the volume entry that you want to format and select Format from the actions [⋮] menu.
   The Format dialog appears.
4. In the Format dialog, specify the following properties and click Format.

   WARNING:

   Formatting a logical volume deletes all the data and sets up a file system.

   Name	In the Name text box, enter a name for the volume file system.
   Type	In the Type drop-down box, select a file system format type, for example: XFS (recommended) – The XFS file system caters for large logical volumes, switching physical drives online without outage, and growing an existing file system. Note: The XFS file system doesn't support reducing the size of a logical volume. For more details, see Resize Logical Volumes. EXT4 – A scalable extension of the ext3 file system. The EXT 4 file system caters for logical volumes, switching physical drives online without outage, and growing and shrinking a file system.
   Overwrite	Select or clear the Overwrite checkbox. When selected, the deleted data is overwritten with zeros, making the deleted data unrecoverable.
   Mount point and options	In the Mount Point text box, specify the mount point path. In the Mount options, select the applicable checkbox options.
   Encryption	In the Encryption drop-down list box, select the appropriate encryption option. For more information, see Lock Disk Device With LUKs.

   Formatting can take several minutes. When complete, the formatted logical volume appears in the Logical volumes table.