[CentOS] When should LVM be used?

Robert Heller heller at deepsoft.com
Fri Jul 30 11:18:23 UTC 2010


At Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:37:21 -0500 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:

> 
> In my old computer I have a much bigger hard drive then in this one --
> and I plan to hand that old computer down to one of my sons -- keeping
> his current drive from an even older computer. Currently the hard
> drive on my old computer has SuSE Linux, but that will go. I'll
> rebuild CentOS 5.5 on it, but I want to leave some free space for
> whatever comes up and also dual-boot Vector Linux. Which, at last,
> brings me to the question...
> 
> Is there any reason to use LVM on a personal desktop install of
> CentOS? It seems to me, for my purposes, that LVM is just a pain in
> the neck -- although I've always just let CentOS set it up during the
> install in the past.  I would like to be able to use parted to resize
> partitions when I want to, and also I'd like Vector Linux to be able
> to read and write data to the CentOS partition. Would I be missing
> something by not installing LVM, or is this mostly for server purposes
> anyhow?

LVM has a number of useful features and advantages.  The 'default'
RedHat/CentOS LVM setup (basically creating one LVM volume taking up all
available space for the root file system), is pretty useless.  With
modern *large* disks.  LVM (if set up properly) allows creating and/or
resizing logical disks without having to shutdown and/or rebooting the
system.  This is often usefull for installing virtual processes (eg with
xen). 

> 
> Thanks for any pointers.
> 

-- 
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