I have 4.1 installed with the default options of full disk encryption (except boot) and LVM with thin provisioning installed on a 250gb SSD, I now have a 500gb second SSD which has two partitions /dev/sdb1 and sdb2 on it. I have been looking around the forum, the qubes webite and across lots of search engines, and I can’t find the correct way to do this…
I converted the empty 300gb /dev/sdb1 to a physical volume so it shows as lvm2, then I did vgextend qubes-dom0 /dev/sdb1 thinking that vm-pool was a huge cluster of lvs, and it said it was successful. It was at this point i realised I was in over my head, with multiple tabs open and none really giving me the answer as to what to do next (or if I should have done that at all)
What I am trying to do is have the the original qubes install boot up and decrypt both physical disks and be able to use both for AppVms.
Could anyone please tell me - is this a good idea (to extend the vm-pool) or should sdb1 be a seperate volume group, and in either case, what do I do to extend the cryptsetup through both physical drives? Any help greatly appreciated.
It seems that you’re looking for this:
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That is where I started.
“These steps assume you have already created a separate volume group and thin pool (not thin volume) for your HDD. See also this example if you would like to create an encrypted LVM pool”
I hadn’t created a seperate vg (i still haven’t as I’ve extended qubes-dom0 vg which i don’t know if i should have done or notl) , and the example didn’t seem to help me understand what to do here at all really.
After getting no-where with extending original volume group, thin-provisioning, encryption etc, I undid the changes i have made and did end up going back to that Secondary storage document!! Using the example at the bottom of the page and with a good few hours, and some trial and error, I now have the first partition of the second drive fully encrypted, being decrypted at boot time with the first drive using the same password, on a seperate volume group, with thin provisioning in and a new vm-pool in that. Cheers!
So, we still don’t have an answer to your question about extending the qubes_dom0 VG and extending the existing vm-pool. You simply followed the Secondary storage document, and created a new VG and new vm-pool on it.
I also tried to extend things, and so far I hasn’t worked. I’m not sure if I’ve used the lvm tools correctly: when I use df -H from the dom0 terminal, I can see /dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-root but I don’t seen any partition for vm-pool. Yet when I use lvm tools, I can see the vm-pool, and that that’s where most of my app qubes live.
Does anyone know if that’s possible to extend the existing VG?
Would anyone who understands thin pools like to explain whether extending the existing VG and thin pool would be a good idea or not?