On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 02:22 +0100, Ewan Mac Mahon wrote:
I have a server with ~16Tb of storage that's shared amongst research groups in a university dept. Each group has their own filesystem, and LVM means that I can allocate space to whichever one particularly needs it without predicting up front who that will be. It lets me add more storage without disrupting the logical structure (e.g. no splitting groups between /mnt/olddisk and /mnt/newdisk and finding that the group that needs more space is on the disk that doens't have any), and it means I can easily allocate space to temporary systems and claim it back afterwards for general use.
That machines predecessor didn't use LVM and it was a nightmare to admin with free space fragmented all over the place. I wouldn't go back.
I'm curious about two things: Wouldn't resizing LVM involve fragmenting the drive, in another way? And, doesn't things like file quotas let you stop some users from using all available space?