Installing RHEL 7 using LVM on sdb instead of sdb1

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I'm trying to install RHEL 7(.5) in VMware with sda for /boot and everything else under LVM on sdb.
The old version of the VM (RHEL 6.9) was installed using LVM directly on the drive (sdb) instead of using the partition table (sdb1)
The admin explained this was done for ease of expansion of the drive, increase drive size in VMware and then directly in LVM, no need to have to expand the partition table.

Problem is, the RHEL 7 installer doesn't let me directly work with the partition table, it decides how to do that.(using sdb1, of course)
When I tried to drop to the CLI and manually create the PV and VG, the installer decided this was from some existing environment and didn't want to go anywhere near it, just letting me delete the whole thing.

Is there a way to do my own partitioning? (or lack of)

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By default the installation program 'anaconda' would create a partition when suggested type of back-end device is a logical volume. As the default first step is to create a physical volume i.e to create a partition in such case. However, if you've done this on RHEL6.x wherein the complete device is taken as physical volume without creating partition (during installation) then you could check the /root/anaconda-ks.cfg file which shows how partitions were created during installation. This file would certainly give you an hint on how physical volume was created.

I've managed to sort it out. If the system boots with the LVM config already existing, the installer doesn't want to do anything but delete. But if you are in the installer and cntrl-alt-F2, pvcreate/vgcreate and then cntrl-alt-F6 back to the installer, it will notice the new VG and allocate FIleSystems to the new VG. But it can be a bit delicate. I successfully created /var, realized the size was incorrect and deleted /var. When I tried to create /var again, it wouldn't let me, didn't want anything to do with the new VG anymore. I reset the configuration and I was able to create FileSystems again all the way through to a successful install.

I agree, just for testing purpose, I tried as you said to create a vm which I was able to make /dev/sdb as a PV, and create lv on it with root file system.

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