[Mageia-dev] time to switch from raw partitions to lvm?

Buchan Milne bgmilne at staff.telkomsa.net
Mon Feb 21 21:38:07 CET 2011


On Monday, 21 February 2011 18:56:22 Jeff Robins wrote:
> > Michael Scherer wrote:
> > > For a linux system, a lvm logical volume is just another disk.
> 
> I've had issues in the past because Linux considered LVM just one logical
> disk and I think the average user would eventually have the same problem as
> well.  I think moving to LVM as the default will create too many complaints
> and support requests in the end.
> 
> A long time ago I had a system with 6 SCSI disks, each 1.2GB.  The system
> was fairly useless with the single disks, but using LVM I had 1 disk of
> reasonable size.  I ran the system for about a year with no problems, but
> then 1 of the disks failed.  Normally this would be a medium inconvenience,
> because I would just have to restore the files from that one drive to
> another drive. However, with the LVM,

... or RAID0 ...

> I lost the ability to read the entire
> LVM.

VG.

> I had to restore the entire system, which was a much bigger pain.  I
> also could not obtain a disk of the same small size for a reasonable price,
> which I was told would make the problem even bigger.

Irrelevant for LVM. Only partly relevant for RAID0.

> If I had used some redundancy, then I might have been able to restore the
> one disk, but I was a novice user and didn't understand the need.  I think
> that most users who use the defaults and probably novice users, or at least
> will be after Mageia takes off.  I think LVM support is a must, but I think
> making it the default, without also making some redundancy the default,
> will cause more problems than it solves.

For single-disk systems, there is no difference.

For multi-disk systems, whether it would have been any different depends on 
whether you had a single VG or multiple VGs.

But, by the time you talk about 6 disks, we're not talking about a default 
anymore.

Regards,
Buchan


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