At Mon, 9 Aug 2010 04:00:27 -0500 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 8:52 AM, Drew drew.kay@gmail.com wrote:
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
I understand the advantages when using a server, but my personal computer is a Small Form Factor Dell GX270 with only one hard drive slot. But I'll look closer into LVM options when I install on the bigger hard drive. Thanks.
I use LVM on my *laptop* with a 40 gig hard drive... Very convientent, esp. when I upgraded from CentOS 4.8 to CentOS 5.<mumble>. My laptop does NOT have any removable media -- that is it is NOT possible to boot off a live CD to repartition the hard drive, so using something like parted is not really a useful option. I can do a PXE boot and run the installer that way. Is is just easier to be able to 'repartition' while running the live system (eg doing lvcreate, lvresize, etc. as needed).