LVM for non-Raid configuration
 

Hi,
this is my first post here, but Im happy to say that I've been able to get all my other questions answered just by looking at previous questions asked. What a great site!

So here's my setup: As a novice Linux user, I get to setup my company's new Dell PowerEdge server with Red Hat EL 5 on it. After getting my Java SDK, Samba, user lists, etc all setup (w00t!), a consultant we are working with says to me "sorry, you should reinstall and start over." Ack!

Apparently, Dell setup our server with a single primary partition, a single volume group and each of the working directories mounted to a logical volume (ie: /var on /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03). Our consultant tells me thats great if we have a raid configuration, but since we dont, its a bad idea, and recovery from a failure when using the LVM is a pain, and we're better off using the logging capabilities of ext3 file sys, and not use the LVM at all.

I couldnt find any threads about using the LVM on a non-RAID setup, just thought id start one and see if anyone out there would agree with what this guy said before I repartition my drives and start over from scratch.

Thanks all!

Yes you can have a LVM on a non-RAID setup, one thing you don't want to do is have a /boot partition part of the LVM volume.

If lets say you are going to use more than one HD for the LVM, make a standard partition for /boot from hda or sda maybe 100mb. Then you can use the remanning space for your LVM.

Each HD will be its own Physical Volume, a physical volume cannot span multiple drives. If you are using two drives you will have two physical volumes. In this example the two physical volumes will make up the Logical Volume Group and from that will be the Logical Volumes / /var and so on. One of which will be free space that you will use to add to any of the other Logical Volumes as needed.