What are the advantages of LVM?

[Michael T. Richter]

On Mon, 2006-22-05 at 22:08 +1000, ruscook wrote:

> > > This is one of
> > > the benefits of LVM. With LVM you can dynamically resize partitions.
> > >     



> > You know, I keep hearing this.  The problem is that, when I
> > experimented with LVM, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what
> > LVM brought to the equation.  I can resize ext2/3fs partitions as it
> > is without LVM.  The process sucks, is highly error prone and is
> > generally a worthless waste of time -- it's faster to tar,
> > repartition, restore -- but it can in theory be done.



> > LVM looked to me like it could only resize partitions if I didn't
> > care about the actual data in it.  You know, as in tar, LVM resize,
> > restore.  So what have I been missing?



> Michael, one cool feature of LVM is it can combine disks into one
> volume and dynamically resize volumes comprising multiple disks.
> Windows does this with dynamic partitions but I don't think it is as
> feature rich as LVM.



> So /home is a partition of 100G, it fills up (as they do), so I buy a
> new 120GB HDD.
> If /home is LVM I can create a physical volume on the new HDD and
> dynamically add it to /home making /home 220G.

 

> This is much easier than alternatives requiring the data to be hived
> off etc..


This I knew and, yes, it is seriously cool.  (If you've got a desktop
machine.)  This part of LVM, however, isn't really all that useful to me
given that I have a laptop and am seriously space-restricted.  I can add
disks, but all removable and LVM really doesn't like storage that can
vanish without warning it seems.  So if I ever get myself a desktop
machine again, I'll probably configure LVM for precisely the reasons you
just gave: the ability to add new disks and not have to repartition and
shift data around, etc. is very, very, very nice.

I still don't see how to resize dynamically, though.  Lots of places and
people positively gush over this purported ability, but I'm just not
finding it.

--
Michael T. Richter
Email: ttmrichter at gmail.com, mtr1966 at hotpop.com
MSN: ttmrichter at hotmail.com, mtr1966 at hotmail.com; YIM:
michael_richter_1966; AIM: YanJiahua1966; ICQ: 241960658; Jabber:
mtr1966 at jabber.cn

"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the
institution of slavery in the States where it exists." --Abraham Lincoln
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