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 adds flexability that regular partitioning can't.
Example 1. Say you've mounted an entire 2TB disk as /home and it's almost full. Now you want to add another 2TB to /home. How do you? Easiest way is with LVM. You just add the new disk into LVM's pool of storage and expand the home partition (Logical volume) to use the new space. Now you have a single filesystem spread across two disks.
Example 2. Now let's say that you bought a NAS device (QNAP, Drobo, Buffalo) that does iSCSI or NFS and you want to move your data off the two local disks. With LVM you just add the new 'disk' into the pool then tell LVM to move existing data off the 'old' disk.
Try doing that with parted. :-P