35.1 An Overview of Logical Volume Management (LVM)

LVM provides a flexible and high level approach to managing disk space. Instead of each disk drive being split into partitions of fixed sizes onto which fixed size file systems are created, LVM provides a way to group together disk space into logical volumes which can be easily resized and moved. In addition, LVM allows administrators to carefully control disk space assigned to different groups of users by allocating distinct volume groups or logical volumes to those users. When the space initially allocated to the volume is exhausted the administrator can simply add more space without having to move the user files to a different file system.

LVM consists of the following components:

35.1.1 Volume Group (VG)

The Volume Group is the high level container which holds one or more logical volumes and physical volumes.

35.1.2 Physical Volume (PV)

A physical volume represents a storage device such as a disk drive or other...