How to Create, Quota, and Expand an XFS Filesystem on RHEL/CentOS 7

XFS is a high‑performance, scalable filesystem and the default on RHEL 7/CentOS 7, offering metadata journaling, online defragmentation, and resizing.

Below are the step‑by‑step commands to create an XFS filesystem, set up LVM, enable quotas, and expand the filesystem.

1. Partition a 2 GB disk and enable LVM

[root@localhost ~]# partprobe /dev/sdb
[root@localhost ~]# parted /dev/sdb mklabel gpt
[root@localhost ~]# parted /dev/sdb mkpart primary 4MiB 2048MiB
[root@localhost ~]# parted /dev/sdb set 1 lvm on

2. Create a Physical Volume (PV)

[root@localhost ~]# pvcreate /dev/sdb1
Physical volume "/dev/sdb1" successfully created

3. Create a Volume Group (VG) named xfsgroup00

[root@localhost ~]# vgcreate xfsgroup00 /dev/sdb1
Volume group "xfsgroup00" successfully created

4. Create a Logical Volume (LV) xfsdata of 1 GiB

[root@localhost ~]# lvcreate -L 1G -n xfsdata xfsgroup00
Logical volume "xfsdata" created

5. Format the LV with XFS

[root@localhost ~]# mkfs.xfs /dev/xfsgroup00/xfsdata

Note: XFS cannot be shrunk after creation; use xfs_growfs to enlarge.

6. Mount the filesystem with quota options

[root@localhost ~]# mkdir /xfsdata
[root@localhost ~]# mount -o uquota,gquota /dev/xfsgroup00/xfsdata /xfsdata
[root@localhost ~]# chmod 777 /xfsdata

7. Configure and verify quotas

# xfs_quota -x -c 'report' /xfsdata
# xfs_quota -x -c 'limit bsoft=100M bhard=120M zhongq' /xfsdata
# xfs_quota -x -c 'report' /xfsdata

Assign a soft limit of 100 MiB and a hard limit of 120 MiB to user zhongq.

8. Test quota enforcement

# su zhongq
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/xfsdata/file1 bs=1M count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/xfsdata/file2 bs=1M count=100
dd: error writing ‘/xfsdata/file2’: Disk quota exceeded

9. Expand the LV to 1.5 GiB and grow the XFS filesystem

[root@localhost ~]# lvextend -L 1.5G /dev/xfsgroup00/xfsdata
Logical volume "xfsdata" successfully resized
[root@localhost ~]# xfs_growfs /dev/xfsgroup00/xfsdata -D 393216
data blocks changed from 262144 to 393216

After expansion, the filesystem shows the new size:

# df -h | grep xfsdata
/dev/mapper/xfsgroup00-xfsdata  1.5G  153M  1.4G  10% /xfsdata

These steps demonstrate full lifecycle management of an XFS filesystem with LVM, quota configuration, and dynamic resizing.