LVM or not? Install Breezy

[Eric S. Johansson]

Walt Bankes wrote:
> Installing Breezy requires one to pick if they want LVM or not.
> I found lots of info about LVM. So now I know what the acronym stands 
> for but all the info I found was either too esoteric or too terse for me 
> to make the decision whether to install LVM or not. Will someone please 
> tell me what advantages LVM gives me when I install it on a Ubuntu only 
> system (two disk drives)  and what possible disadvantage there may be.
> Thanks, Walt Bankes
> 

there are only two reasons to install LVM.  if you needed and if you are 
learning about it.  here is a rough rule of thumb for whether you need 
LVM or not.  Do you need the ability to resize partitions or allocate 
only a portion of your disk now but add empty disk space to other 
partitions later?  Do you need to back up the entire partitions while 
they are being used (i.e. snapshots).

disadvantages are additional complexity.  The more layers of software 
you have, the more likely it is that something will go wrong.

There are probably more reasons but these the two I use.  I think one of 
the other advantages is that you can move partitions from disk to disk 
but I may be confusing LVM2 with EVMS (LVM on steroids).

now if you are using a virtual machine system like XEN, then you 
definitely want to use LVM to create and manage the disk images for your 
virtual machines.  it makes things so much easier you wouldn't believe it.

--- eric