Re: LVM usage

[erik@debian.franken.de (Erik Tews)]

On Wed, May 21, 2003 at 10:28:53AM -0500, Jack Cobb wrote:
> We are interested in using LVM on our Debian Woody install.  We
> currently have a box with two DASD devices using the ext3 filesystem.
> Has anyone used LVM before and are there any issues we should be aware
> of before proceeding?

Generally, LVM is a fine thing. There are currently 4 implementations
for Linux I know. The first one is the old LVM from Sistina. It is
included in the 2.4 kernel and works very well. There is a additional
patch called vfs-locking-patch which makes snapshotting mounted
filesystems a little bit better.

The second one is the new LVM2. The on-disk format is the same but it is
a complete rewrite of lvm1 which makes the code much cleaner and
generic. And the kernel-driver is much more smaller and can be used for
other things as well.

The third one is evms from ibm. It is open source too and the on-disk
format is compatibel too. There are 2 versions. The first version with
the last release 1.2.1 has a own kernel-driver wich does much more
things in kernel-space than lvm1 or lvm2. And it offers more features
than the sistina lvm and makes it possible to administrade lvm, raid and
co from one gui or command-line-interface.

The new evms uses the same kernel-code as lvm2 and has nearly the same
features as evms1. The current release is 2.0.1 I think. Because it uses
the same kernel-code as lvm2, it will be possible when 2.6.0 is released
to install lvm2 or evms2 without having to touch the kernel because this
code will be included in 2.6.0.

All implementations seem to be very stable at the moment and they make
it easyer to make online-backups with linux.