At Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:37:21 -0500 CentOS mailing list centos@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.