The default layout for disks in a Centos deployment may make sense for the average use case, but not for using the machine as a Tripleo all-in-one development box. I have 500 GB of Disk space, and the default installer puts 400GB into /home and 50 GB into /. However, since most of the work here is going to be done in virtual machines, the majority of the /home space is wasted, and I found I have filled up the 50 GB partition on / on a regular basis. So, I want to remove /home and put all the space under /.

Here is my start state.

# df -h
Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/centos-root   50G   18G   33G  35% /
devtmpfs                  16G     0   16G   0% /dev
tmpfs                     16G     0   16G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                     16G   33M   16G   1% /run
tmpfs                     16G     0   16G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/centos-home  411G  1.9G  409G   1% /home
/dev/sda1                497M  167M  331M  34% /boot
tmpfs                    3.2G     0  3.2G   0% /run/user/0

Thus far, I only have 1.9 GB under /home, and 33 out of 50 GB under /, so I have enough space to work with. I start by backing up the /home subdirectories to space on the partition that holds /.

mkdir /home-alt
df -h
mv /home/stack/ /home-alt/
umount /home

Edit the Filesystem table to remove the home directory in the future.

#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Wed Jan 20 14:27:36 2016
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
/dev/mapper/centos-root /                       xfs     defaults        0 0
UUID=3347d9ba-bb62-44cf-8dfc-1b961279f428 /boot                   xfs     defaults        0 0
#/dev/mapper/centos-home /home                   xfs     defaults        0 0
/dev/mapper/centos-swap swap                    swap    defaults        0 0

From the above, we can see that the partition for / and /home are /dev/mapper/centos-root and /dev/mapper/centos-home.

using the pvs command, I can see one physical volume:

  PV         VG     Fmt  Attr PSize   PFree 
  /dev/sda2  centos lvm2 a--  476.45g 64.00m

Using vgs, I can see a singe volume group:

  VG     #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree 
  centos   1   3   0 wz--n- 476.45g 64.00m

And finally, using lvs I see the three logical volumes that appeared in my fstab;

  LV   VG     Attr       LSize   Pool Origin Data%  Meta%  Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert
  home centos -wi-a----- 410.70g                                                    
  root centos -wi-ao----  50.00g                                                    
  swap centos -wi-ao----  15.69g 

Remove the centos-home volume:

lvremove /dev/mapper/centos-home
Do you really want to remove active logical volume home? [y/n]: y
  Logical volume "home" successfully removed

Extend the centos-root volume by 410GB. I can resize the underlying file system at the same time by passing -r.

lvextend -r /dev/mapper/centos-root /dev/sda2

Check if it worked:

# df -h
Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/centos-root  461G   20G  442G   5% /
devtmpfs                  16G     0   16G   0% /dev
tmpfs                     16G     0   16G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                     16G   33M   16G   1% /run
tmpfs                     16G     0   16G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1                497M  167M  331M  34% /boot
tmpfs                    3.2G     0  3.2G   0% /run/user/0

I’ll admit, that was easier than I expected.

Return the /home subdirectories to their correct positions in the directory tree.

# mv /home-alt/ayoung/ /home/
# mv /home-alt/stack/ /home/
# rmdir /home-alt/

For references I used:

1. How to Extend/Reduce LVM’s (Logical Volume Management) in Linux – Part II
2. Resize your disks on the fly with LVM
3. and the man pages for the commands listed.