[CentOS] When should LVM be used?

[James Hogarth]

>
> BUT, let's say you decide to allocate 10GB to /, 4GB to swap & 1GB to /tmp.
> Suddenly your / partition is full and you can't install more stuff. With LVM
> you can quickly shrink /home and increase the size of /. All on the go
> without having to reboot. I found this very handy while working on a Windows
> VM installed on my home PC, which was busy doing some video rendering and I
> didn't want to stop the rendering to increse the / partition.
>

Just a note to say this behaviour is dependant on the filesystem on
top of the LVM logical volume.... Some (most?) will require you to
take the mounted volume offline to shrink with not all allowing online
increasing of size... so it is important to double check the
documentation for your filesystem before carrying out such an exercise
whilst the volume is mounted... and of course as with any changes to
partitioning information and volumes ensure you have a backup of the
data when resizing (especially shrinking) in case of any corruption or
issues in the process....

James