There are three commands you can use to display properties of LVM physical volumes: pvs, pvdisplay, and pvscan.

The pvs command provides physical volume information in a configurable form, displaying one line per physical volume. The pvs command provides a great deal of format control, and is useful for scripting. For information on using the pvs command to customize your output, see Section 4.9, “Customized Reporting for LVM”.

The pvdisplay command provides a verbose multi-line output for each physical volume. It displays physical properties (size, extents, volume group, etc.) in a fixed format.

The following example shows the output of the pvdisplay command for a single physical volume.

# pvdisplay
  --- Physical volume ---
  PV Name               /dev/sdc1
  VG Name               new_vg
  PV Size               17.14 GB / not usable 3.40 MB
  Allocatable           yes
  PE Size (KByte)       4096
  Total PE              4388
  Free PE               4375
  Allocated PE          13
  PV UUID               Joqlch-yWSj-kuEn-IdwM-01S9-XO8M-mcpsVe

The pvscan command scans all supported LVM block devices in the system for physical volumes.

The following command shows all physical devices found:

# pvscan
 PV /dev/sdb2   VG vg0   lvm2 [964.00 MB / 0   free]
 PV /dev/sdc1   VG vg0   lvm2 [964.00 MB / 428.00 MB free]
 PV /dev/sdc2            lvm2 [964.84 MB]
 Total: 3 [2.83 GB] / in use: 2 [1.88 GB] / in no VG: 1 [964.84 MB]

You can define a filter in the lvm.conf so that this command will avoid scanning specific physical volumes. For information on using filters to control which devices are scanned, see Section 4.6, “Controlling LVM Device Scans with Filters”.