Storage Management

It feels like there’s never going to be enough space on our servers for everything that needs to be stored there. Despite the fact that the storage capacity of hard disks continues to increase and high-capacity disks are now more affordable than ever, our servers quickly fill up any available space. Our best efforts as server administrators have always been to order machines with as much storage as possible, but the reality is that even the most well-planned enterprises eventually run out of space. Additional storage space will certainly need to be added at some point in the course of administering your servers. Storage management, however, entails more than simply replacing full disks with empty ones. Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and other similar technologies can greatly simplify your work if you start using them as soon as possible, thus it’s crucial to plan ahead.

The concepts discussed in this chapter, including LVM itself, will allow you greater...