The vgscan command scans all supported disk devices in the system looking for LVM physical volumes and volume groups. This builds the LVM cache in the /etc/lvm/.cache file, which maintains a listing of current LVM devices.

LVM runs the vgscan command automatically at system startup and at other times during LVM operation, such as when you execute a vgcreate command or when LVM detects an inconsistency. You may need to run the vgscan command manually when you change your hardware configuration, causing new devices to be visible to the system that were not present at system bootup. This may be necessary, for example, when you add new disks to the system on a SAN or hotplug a new disk that has been labeled as a physical volume.

You can define a filter in the lvm.conf file to restrict the scan to avoid specific devices. For information on using filters to control which devices are scanned, see Section 4.6, “Controlling LVM Device Scans with Filters”.

The following example shows the output of a vgscan command.

# vgscan
  Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...
  Found volume group "new_vg" using metadata type lvm2
  Found volume group "officevg" using metadata type lvm2