Re: [opensuse] LVM
- From: Anton Aylward <opensuse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:35:10 -0500
Steven Hess said the following on 02/15/2012 04:39 PM:
Can anyone point me to an explanation of how to use LVM written in
terms a endluzer can understand?
A recent attempt at LVM on a 12.1 install was a disaster as it decided
to touch all the other HD's with distros installed in the test machine
and render it's self unbootable after a few days with an fsck error
relating to a drive marked with a date in the future.
A 'how-to' will necessitate some understanding of the concepts behind
LVM. Without that, its easy to make a catastrophic mess. Will them, I
wonder wtf you did, since to me, after using it for a decade "its all
obvious".
I started, as you might see if you check the archives for my past posts
on LVM, with a volume manager under AIX, and then with the LVM in suse
when I started using that about a decade ago. The source paper I used
was written by Michael Hasenstein, mha@xxxxxxxx, and is very clear.
http://www.suse.de/cgi-bin/print_page_www.pl?NPSPath=/webredesign/htdocs/en/whitepapers/lvm/lvm1.html
http://www.suse.de/cgi-bin/print_page_www.pl?NPSPath=/webredesign/htdocs/en/whitepapers/lvm/lvm2.html
The RedHat documentation is also excellent.
I find LVM very stable and consider it an essential.
Yes it can be abused.
One of the problems I've heard from other people is that they leave all
their disks connected during an install and the installation partitioner
tries to grab them all. This really has nothing to do with LVM. At
this point to have to be very, very strict.
As other people here have pointed out, it makes good sense to devote a
partition to /boot. I make it about 150-200M (well, OK its about 300M
on this machine and I've got a few more kernels than I really use) and
make it ext3 or ext4. With 12.1 you may want to have / (including /usr)
in a partition as well. (I have it in LVM but them I've experimented
and learnt.)
What I recommend then is to make the rest of the drive an extended
partition and make it of type LVM.
If you are doing this properly then the installation partition will
'recurse' and let you set up 'partitions' under LVM. I *strongly*
suggest that you do a minimalist config - do *not* allocate all the space.
Yes, LVM can span multiple partitions and multiple spindles.
But if you are a newcomer to it my recommendation is *DON'T* *DO*
*THAT*. Not doing it at the start won't prevent you expanding to it
later when you have a better understanding and more experience.
Anything that is complex can be messed up. Any tool such as YAST or the
installer has to give a balance between power and flexibility. You have
the power to shoot yourself in the foot, and the tool has to assume you
know what you're doing.
My recommendation for LVM first time users is not to use it as part of
the install. Have a running system. Add a drive (or make use of the
spare space on a large drive) and set up LVM there. That way you won't
barf your running system.
Yes there are people here who will badmouth LVM. When I drill down I
find they used an early version or made some wrong assumptions or
something. As with any powerful tool you need to understand the
what-and-how-and-why. Given that, its fabulous and I can't imagine
running serious installation without it.
--
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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