What Is Lvm - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5 - DEPLOYMENT Deployment Manual

Chapter 9.
LVM (Logical Volume Manager)

9.1. What is LVM?

LVM is a tool for logical volume management which includes allocating disks, striping, mirroring and
resizing logical volumes.
With LVM, a hard drive or set of hard drives is allocated to one or more physical volumes. LVM
physical volumes can be placed on other block devices which might span two or more disks.
The physical volumes are combined into logical volumes, with the exception of the /boot/ partition.
The /boot/ partition cannot be on a logical volume group because the boot loader cannot read it. If
the root (/) partition is on a logical volume, create a separate /boot/ partition which is not a part of a
volume group.
Since a physical volume cannot span over multiple drives, to span over more than one drive, create
one or more physical volumes per drive.
Figure 9.1. Logical Volumes
The volume groups can be divided into logical volumes, which are assigned mount points, such as /
home and / and file system types, such as ext2 or ext3. When "partitions" reach their full capacity, free
space from the volume group can be added to the logical volume to increase the size of the partition.
When a new hard drive is added to the system, it can be added to the volume group, and partitions
that are logical volumes can be increased in size.
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