Ewan Mac Mahon wrote:
On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 12:10:41PM +0930, Tim wrote:
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
<snip> >> 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.
There are issues about how you partition a giant hard drive like that. I forget just how many partitions your allowed but it is small compared to the size. I guess your the IT expert and you have REAL Experience to back your support for LVM.
I'm curious about two things: Wouldn't resizing LVM involve fragmenting the drive, in another way?
Only physically; if I allocate space to one filesystem, then create another, then extend the first one then the physical storage for the first one will be in two chunks with the second fs sitting between them. The point of LVM is that I don't need to care about it since it appears as a single logical space.
And, doesn't things like file quotas let you stop some users from using all available space?
Up to a point, but group quotas are rather less straightforward, IMHO.
There's the further point that I have some additional storage to add to this system; once I've done that with LVM I can simply seamlessly extend any of the existing filesystems onto that storage; while you could probably divide up the pie with quotas, there'd be no way to make the whole pie bigger.
Ewan
At my school the departments all have a computer that backs up all the computers in the departments. The Hard Drive(s) are smaller but do the job.
At home I have a tiny 160 GB and I do not need LVM and in fact it makes for even more wasted space than using the old /.