How To Resize LVM Volumes Dynamically In Cloud-Init VMs (Step-By-Step)

Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is the preferred storage framework for Linux VMs. It's easy to resize LVM volumes, migrate data between devices, and combine multiple physical disks into one easy-to-mange volume. These features are especially useful in a virtualized environment, as they enable you to do these tasks without physical access to the machine. When creating VM templates, it's common to create a fixed-size volume for the root partition and use cloud-init to grow the partition size dynamically when cloning the template (unless you want to create multiple templates with each one having 10G, 11G, 12G... storage and so on). However, you can't simply use the built-in growpart module to resize logical volumes. It only works on partitions . But that doesn't mean you should avoid using LVM in your templates. After a few trials and tribulations, I've found a workaround that allows cloud-init to automatically resize logical volumes, as well as a few pitfalls you should avoid when using clo