[ale] Question: to LVM or not LVM

[cfowler at outpostsentinel.com]

On Sat, Feb 10, 2007 at 01:04:06PM -0500, Robert Reese wrote:
> I have a question I hope y'all can help me with...
> 
> I am installing openSUSE 10.2 on my laptop and want to use the Xen virtualization or the VMWare solution to run XP Pro inside a virtual machine.  Looking at LVM, which I found is different than a VM, the prospect intrigues me as I have a growing number of spare harddrives and external harddrives.
> 
> The question is whether I should install openSUSE with LVM or will I find a much more difficult time ahead than without LVM?

Good question.  I don't really care for it personally.  I used LVM on AIX
and had good reason to.  We would install systems and they of course would
have small disks.  Using LVM we were able to add a new hard disk(s) and
we could grow the AIX FS into those disks.  Need more pagging space?  That was
under LVM too.  We would just grow that into new disks.  With Linux I've had
decent size disks and have never had to use LVM for any reason.  I guess
you could grow the LVM to use more space but what about ext3?  Does
ext3 support growth or shrinkage?  I've never used it enough to know.

LVM to me is good when you have more than one disk or plan on it
in the future and want to grow your file systems into new space.  It
is easier to grow the FS then to tar it up, re-format, and un tar it
back on the newly formated FS.  Other than that I don't really see the 
benefit of using LVM.  Especially if you only have one drive to begin
with.  

> 
> TIA,
> Robert Reese~
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------
>    * Microsoft is NOT a standard. *
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> 
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