hello!

i've been tasked with setting up a new server to hold our ever growing storage needs. we purchased a server with 2x74G drives for the OS (RHEL4) and 14x500Gb drives in RAID 5. it's replacing an old server that houses our 2 company shared storage drives: Department drive, and the Shared Drive.

i'm a little confused as how to set up LVM volumes when dealing with RAID and something called 'extents' in LVM.

below are my fdisk results
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$ fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 69.9 GB, 69989302272 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 8509 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 25 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 26 8056 64509007+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 8057 8509 3638722+ 82 Linux swap

Disk /dev/sdb: 6499.8 GB, 6499861528576 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 790229 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 255531 2052547115 8e Linux LVM

###########################
# pvscan
No matching physical volumes found

so nothing has been set up yet. i've read several of contrasting reports on whether we should set up LVM on the entire disk array or split it up.

so the question is, should i create 2 physical partitions, one for each drive, Department & Shared? can they be expanded?
or should i just do:
pvcreate /dev/sdb1
?

thanks,
disorderly