Sometime I have the necessity to install a Centos 7 system with the Desktop.

A lot of times happened that I have only the CentOS 7 minimal ISO image available on my PC.

Instead of downloading the Desktop ISO I wants to show you how to  proceed with the minimal ISO installation and then install the desktop with yum.

After the system is up and running with the minimal installation, login into SSH to the system with your username (in this case “user”) or login with root user

ssh [email protected]

Once logged elevates the user privileges with:

user@minimalhost ~% su -

I gonna install Gnome Desktop with yum (-y will reply automatically ‘yes’ to yum)

yum groupinstall 'GNOME Desktop' -y

I want also to automatically start the desktop manager when I power on the system. To set default target in systemctl to ‘graphical.target’ and I can do that with:

systemctl set-default graphical.target

I bought a new set of disk for my HP Microserver Gen10, 2x 10Tb WD HDD, after setting them in RAID 1, I had the necessity migrate the currently running Virtual Machines without creating downtimes, loosing data and of course not waste much time to perform this migration.

Lucky for me I have setup the Microserver Gen10 with LVM this will simplify a lot the procedure that I gonna explain to you below.

First of all I have initialized the physical volume with the command:

pvcreate /dev/sdc

After this I have extended my logical volume called “vms” with vgexent command:

vgextend vms /dev/sdc

After that I started the migration of all Logical Volume from physical volume /dev/sdb to the new physical volume /dev/sdc:

pvmove -b /dev/sdb /dev/sdc

I started then to monitor the progress of the migration with:

progress lvs -a -o+devices

When migration finished I removed the disk from the volume group and then removed the LVM signature from the disk:

vgreduce vms /dev/sdb
pvremove /dev/sdb

That’s it! Now you can remove the HDD/HDDs from the system, hope this guide have helped you.