Categories
How-To Software Technical

Openfiler – case of the missing storage

Today I was doing some cleanup on one of my Openfiler SAN Servers, in an attempt to recover unused disk space when I encounter an odd issue of the storage not being reclaimed.

After waiting sometime I decided to investigate this problem. Opening putty, I SSH’ed into the server and was able to see that the volume was not mounted (mount –a).

So what happened:
I deleted a volume using the Openfiler Web Interface
The expected free space was not released

I then moved to doing the following (thanks Pete, for the guidance)
Using the command lvdisplay I was able to show all logical volumes on the server

Like the one I had attempted to delete below

— Logical volume —
LV Name /dev/raid50_volume/somedisk
VG Name raid50_volume
LV UUID ZJfw7Z-WofM-RRVd-L93K-9qU0-Te7J-F3OF98
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 0
LV Size 1.00 TiB
Current LE 32768
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
– currently set to 256
Block device 253:6

I then issued the command:
lvremove /dev/raid50_volume/somedisk

I was then asked the following:
Do you really want to remove active logical volume somedisk? [y/n]: y

After submitting ‘y‘ for yes, the following was my result:
Logical volume “somedisk” successfully removed

I went back to the webUI and refreshed the page and 1TB of data was once again available for use.

System Information

Kernel Version: 2.6.32-71.18.1.el6-0.20.smp.gcc4.1.x86_64
Name: Openfiler NAS/SAN