| LVM is an old favorite among HP-UX administrators. As a disk management product, it has most features you could ask for. It offers mirroring, striping, and concurrent access (shared volume groups); if your applications can cope with it, it supports rootability on all platforms as well as capabilities to support clustering. What are its failings? -
LVM doesn't support software RAID 5. -
LVM doesn't really support RAID 0/1 except in a compromise scenario. -
LVM doesn't support multiple, concurrent links to disks. (PV Links only provide failover, not load balancing.) -
LVM doesn't have an intuitive GUI. (SAM doesn't count.) -
There is the problem of portability between operating systems, although with LVM now in the Linux community, this failing is becoming less and less. -
Lastly, LVM doesn't easily allow for forward compatibility with newer /bigger disk drives . Failures relating to RAID levels are often brushed aside with comments such as: " If you want that level of high-availability and performance, buy yourself a disk array. " If you accept these failings, there are few reasons to not use LVM. |