OPS245 Lab 5

LVM Overview

A fixed partitioning setup works fine in many scenarios, but it lacks a lot of flexibility. Using LVM we can avoid the slow and complicated process you've seen in the previous lab, when we tried to extend the size of a partition.

Here's a comparison of how a physical storage device is used in the traditional setup (the one we've worked with in lab 4) and in LVM:

Traditional partitioning	LVM
Connect new physical device. Create partitions on the device. Format the partitions. Mount the formatted partitions.	Connect new physical device. Mark the device to be used as a physical volume in LVM. Add the physical volume to a volume group. Create a logical volume. Format the logical volume. Mount the logical volume.

Effectively a logical volume is equivalent to a partition, but it is not expected to be fixed in size, and it is not stuck on any specific hardware storage device.