The case against LVM
Karl Larsen
k5di at zianet.com
Wed Aug 1 11:50:51 UTC 2007
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 /.
--
Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
Linux User
#450462 http://counter.li.org.
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