Logical Volumes
Motivation
When you setup your system you will partition your hard-drive and reserve some space for it. Later you will find that the space is to small. Especially on server systems it is a good idea to have separate partition so that e.g. an user in his/her home-directory can not fill the space for the / and /var partitions, etc.. But on important server systems you also want to be able to increase that space without rebooting. You might also come across the case that you want to create a consistent snapshot of a partition or you want a volume that stretches over more then one physical device.
For all of this LVM (Logicial Volume Management) has a solution. Usually it is a good idea to setup your system with LVM even if it is just a personal laptop.
LVM concepts and terms
There are 3 main entities in LVM:
- pv - physcial volume: where you store your data: usually a partition on a hard drive e.g. /dev/sda7 or a complete drive e.g.: /dev/sdg
- vg - volume group: pv's grouped together to form one pool where you can store your data. Each vg has a name. E.g. you could use rootvg as the name of your main vg.
- lv - logical volume - a block-device where you can create your files-system. Each lv takes up a space in one vg. E.g. you could have rootlv as the lv for your root file-system. If the name of the volume group would be rootvg then that would be /dev/rootvg/rootlv
