One thing I adore about the Bobcares family is the enthusiasm to share. I was flipping through the articles already written in the Bobcares blog, and boo!! I stumbled upon an article on LVM, written by Indu Shabna way back in 2008. I guess its a crime to call that an article. One could say, “study“. Or even “thesis“. That is the kind of techs we have here – harbingers of technology and evangelists of information sharing. Now, lets get to the topic, LVM.

LVMs are best suited for creating hard-disk farms. Lets take a simple scenario. You have 10 HDD’s of 10 gb each. Normally, the best option you’ve got is to create 10 different drives/partitions, by mounting each of them separately. With LVM, you are creating a pool. Next, you can divide the pool as per your requirement, lets say 25×4 or 50×2.

Putting aside a hundred great things, the best part is that LVM enables you to go for dynamic resizing, hard-drive replacement and repartitioning. How, I’ll explain.

• It can resize volume groups(size of the big pool). That too with ZERO DOWNTIME
• Resize the logical volumes(the smaller ones we created out of the pool). Again, ZERO DOWNTIME
• Take backups of the whole disk drive using snapshots.

Thats it, folks! Sweet, huh? In the post I mentioned earlier, Indu describes all about installation, usage, and a detailed section on the must-know commands. Its a lovely article, written exhaustively covering all the possible details. I would say, if you ever think of an article on LVM, just google “Bobcares+LVM” and the first entry you get will be Indu’s. That’ll be the only one you’ll ever need.

About the Author

Jeevan Joseph has been with Bobcares for a year, and is now heading the Public Relations wing of the company. He has worked as a developer as well as a technical support in the past for startups to Datacenters.

Jeevan, after graduating in Electronics and Communications Engineering, turned into the web-hosting domain out of the passion for open source. As an eloquent orator, he spends his spare time with the Toastmasters, and has given sessions to over 2500 people in the past 4 years.