What are the advantages of LVM?

[Dick Davies]

On 22/05/06, Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:

> Making a backup onto tape or disk takes time.  From the start to the
> finish of the backup the data being copied can easily have changed
> enough that the backup is not self-consistant.  With an LVM snapshot
> you know it is self-consistent, now you can backup the snapshot
> without worrying about racing ongoing activity.

Be nice if that were true, but I've heard from a lot of people that LVM
snapshots (at least the read/write kind, which are the useful ones for
the reasons you state below ) are too buggy to be trusted.

Hopefully someone will port ZFS soon, and we can all just use that :)

>  - The related ability to have multiple filesystems that are similar
>    to each other, and only store the common data once.
>
> This interesting when playing with things like Qemu, Vmware, and Xen,
> where you might have multiple virtual Linux machines running (or not
> running) at once.  Storing only how they differ from each other can
> save resources.  I think both disk and runtime.

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