I want to start by saying I already resolved my issue but I want to understand why I am seeing what I am seeing.
I have a server with a RAID controller two 500GB drives and six 600GB drives. The two 500GB drives are mirrored and have the OS installed on them. The six 600GB they wanted set as RAID0 and wanted them in a new volume group. My issue was getting the full size out of the RAID0 Virtual Disk.
On boot I saw the disk:
sd 0:2:1:0: [sdb] 7025983488 512-byte logical blocks: (3.59 TB/3.27 TiB)
I work mostly with LUNs and generally I can just do a pvcreate and I am ready to use the disk. But I could not issue a pvcreate on /dev/sdb and it seemed to need to be partitioned. So I used fdisk using this procedure, which I found to be the same on Red Hat's website:
Create Linux Partition
Once I had a partition I was issuing a pvcreate /dev/sdb1 and each time I ended up with only 2TB of usable space.
[root@testserv dev]# pvcreate /dev/sdb1
Physical volume "/dev/sdb1" successfully created
[root@testserv dev]# pvscan
PV /dev/sda2 VG vg01 lvm2 [464.75 GiB / 355.75 GiB free]
PV /dev/sdb1 lvm2 [2.00 TiB]
I ended up just issuing a pvremove, removing the partition and issueing a vgcreate against the raw device. I noticed that the vgcreate created the physical volume for me and it was the correct size.
[root@testserv ~]# vgcreate scratchvg /dev/sdb
No physical volume label read from /dev/sdb
Physical volume "/dev/sdb" successfully created
Volume group "scratchvg" successfully created
[root@testserv ~]# pvscan
PV /dev/sdb VG scratchvg lvm2 [3.27 TiB / 3.27 TiB free]
PV /dev/sda2 VG vg01 lvm2 [464.75 GiB / 355.75 GiB free]
Total: 2 [3.73 TiB] / in use: 2 [3.73 TiB] / in no VG: 0 [0 ]
My question is, what am I missing? I am completely fine with just skipping the fdisk and pvcreate steps but I thought I had to do those steps. What was I doing wrong? What is the proper procedure when taking a Virtual Disk presented by a RAID controller and creating or adding it to a volume group? I guess my own answer would be the procedure that works, but since I found so many references to using fdisk and partitioning the disk I am curious why that was not working for me. Thanks.