Creating Volume Groups - Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION 04-08-2006 Installation Manual

Instead of LVM 2, you can use EVMS (Enterprise Volume Management System),
which offers a uniform interface for logical volumes and RAID volumes. Like LVM 2,
EVMS makes use of the device mapper in kernel 2.6.
6.1.2 LVM Configuration with YaST
The YaST LVM configuration can be reached from the YaST Expert Partitioner (see
Section 7.5.8, "Partitioner" (page 161)). This partitioning tool enables you to edit and
delete existing partitions and create new ones that should be used with LVM. There,
create an LVM partition by first clicking Create → Do not format then selecting 0x8E
Linux LVM as the partition identifier. After creating all the partitions to use with LVM,
click LVM to start the LVM configuration.

Creating Volume Groups

If no volume group exists on your system yet, you are prompted to add one (see Fig-
ure 6.2, "Creating a Volume Group" (page 126)). It is possible to create additional groups
with Add group, but usually one single volume group is sufficient. system is suggested
as a name for the volume group in which the SUSE® Linux Enterprise system files are
located. The physical extent size defines the size of a physical block in the volume
group. All the disk space in a volume group is handled in chunks of this size. This value
is normally set to 4 MB and allows for a maximum size of 256 GB for physical and
logical volumes. The physical extent size should only be increased, for example, to 8,
16, or 32 MB, if you need logical volumes larger than 256 GB.
Figure 6.2 Creating a Volume Group
126 Installation and Administration