Marko Vojinovic wrote:
On Tue, 23 Jun 2015 11:15:30 -0500 Jason Warr jason@warr.net wrote:
I'm curious what has made some people hate LVM so much. I have been using it for years on thousands of production systems with no issues that could not be easily explained as myself or someone else doing something stupid. And even those issues were pretty few and far between.
/opens can of worms
Well, I can only tell you my own story, I wouldn't know about other people. Basically, it boils down to the following:
(1) I have no valid usecase for it. I don't remember when was the last time I needed to resize partitions (probably back when I was trying to install Windows 95). Disk space is very cheap, and if I really need to have *that* much data on a single partition, another drive and a few intelligently placed symlinks are usually enough. Cases where a symlink cannot do the job are indicative of a bad data structure design, and LVM is often not a solution, but a patch over a deeper problem elsewhere. Though I do admit there are some valid usecases for LVM.
(2) It is fragile. If you have data on top of LVM spread over an array of disks, and one disk dies, the data on the whole array goes away. I don't know why such a design of LVM was preferred over something more robust (I guess there are reasons), but it doesn't feel right. A bunch of flawless drives containing corrupt data is Just Wrong(tm). I know, one should always have backups, but still...
<snip> I thought it was interesting years ago, having seen and worked with it in Tru64. These days, if I needed more space, I'd go with plain RAID.
In general, the less complex the better, and the easier to recover when something fails.
mark