>Just curious, why have you stopped using LVM?

Simply for ease of maintenance: some recovery and backup utilities like clonezilla can't work with LVM. And because the same names for volume groups are used for each centos install, so trying to attach a drive or volume to a new system for rescue causes conflicts unless you take steps and use unique names from the start. (Although I hear that newer versions of centos/RH will create unique names for you)

As I said, LVM works fine for VMs and can be used slice up a volume for guests to be used as a true block device.

By the way, a true block device means a raw partition on the disk is given to the guest to format and use as its own - so no existing file system is present. It's almost like giving a guest its own drive to work from, and should operate at the same native speeds as the host.