Booting - Enterprise Volume Management System

[Alexander Skwar]

· rpowersau at gmail.com <rpowersau at gmail.com>:

> On 8/11/06, Toby Kelsey <toby_kelsey at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>> Alexander Skwar wrote:
>> Since the main LVM advantage is meant to be easy resizing, using JFS and XFS
>> negate that - except for growth into unused disk-space.  They also have that
>> disadvantage with old-fashioned partitioning as you note.
>>
>> If you're going to keep large chunks of disk unallocated to allow LVM to work,
>> you could just as well use that space to copy or resize basic partitions.  It
>> seems to me that LVM is mainly advantageous when you have limited disk-space,
>> and in that case you need to be able to shrink as well as grow filesystems.
> 
> I thought the advantage of LVM was that it lets you mount partitions
> on logical volumes which could be allocated across multiple drives? So 
> that if you run out of room, you can just plug in a new hard drive and
> make your partition larger by including the new drive in the lvm?

Yes, that's one of the advantages of LVM.

But he's somewhat correct: With LVM, you normally don't allocate
all the available space to the LVs and filesystems you've got on
a system. Normally, you'll find, that quite some space is unallocated.
That's usually done, so that other LVs (and thus filesystems) can
be made larger, when it's required. One of the advantages thus is,
that you don't have to look "far" in the future when you install 
a system and very much anticipate, how large your filesystems will
grow.

Alexander Skwar
-- 
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