What are your uses for LVM ?

[lullysing]

I've been reading on the stuff and from my angle, LVM seems to be only useful for clustering ( aka, get several disks and get them all under one logical disk to make things easy). I am most probably wrong. It's also awefully similar to some kind of weirdly complicated RAID setup.

Since i assume my PFYness when it comes to the usefulness of technology, please tell me what uses you have for LVM ( linux logical volume manager ) related technologies so i can be... enlightened (?) as to what LVM is useful to?




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when someone asks for your username and password, and much *clickely clickely* is happening in the background, know enough that you should be worried.

 

[unixfreak]

The LVM makes things *so* much easier. Creating "partitions" and file systems, moving them around and resizing them is childs play. With the LVM your disks become virtual and have no boundaries (except when you hit the maximum storage for the VG).

You should definately use it. You'll thank youself in a very short time!

Also the LVM has nothing to do with RAID. You've probably read some description of setting up RAID on LVM devices.

Cheers

 

[lullysing]

What about performance and CPU effort for dealing with all the extra LVM "oomph" ?

Say i did something dumb and made the whole disk one big partition : Would LVMing the disk enable me to un-fs.. the disk partitions to something that would be better? and how about when the disk dies, Is an LVM-enabled disk recuperable at all or it's readable only to the host system ?

_____________________________
when someone asks for your username and password, and much *clickely clickely* is happening in the background, know enough that you should be worried.

 

[unixfreak]

LVM itself uses a bit CPU (%5+) but because you can move all your data around you can easily make up for that.

LVM itself doesn't have any RAID functionality or redundancy. You have to do that the same way as before. All I'm saying is that using the LVM makes it so much easier bacause you don't have fixed partitions and sized.

If you go to

http://www.sistina.com

I'm sure they have some good LVM documentation you can read.

Check it out. The LVM is really amazing.

Cheers