So i never worked with LVM as it seemed a little abstract for me, however since its a good idea to know how to use it, i would try and play with it for awhile.

so the LVM basicly makes virtual drives, on a physical disk partitoned as a LVM system..

and then control the system inside the LVM environment.

so is there any reason to partition my pysical disk, as LVM seems to use it as 1 drive anyway?

even my swap seems to run perfectly inside the LVM.. maby it gives a little more cpuload, i actually dont know.. any expert that can tell me please?

anyway g'day all

There may be larger fundamental issues with that, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were, but initially I'd be concerned about having /boot inside LVM. grub2 can handle a /boot partition inside, but I don't think any other bootloader can.

And there are various performance reports that show a reduced system load when passing through LVM. I tried to understand why but I failed!

LVM seems nice until you see better solutions like ZFS, which fully merges both a filesystem and container mechanism, as opposed to using LVM + ext3 to do the same thing. Much nicer from my limited experience of it on Solaris.

so if i can get away with it, i should just use a system without LVM?
currently i have 15 severs.. 3 of them are gateways, as there are no reason i use a simple ext4 filesystem on them, however i got some Images servers for a PXE system we got, and some roeaming profiles folders, we mount directly.

currently it all run on pysical disks smoothly.. however each time we need to upgrade with more disk space, as we keep using all we have, its a pain to swap.

i was wondering if LVM could help in any way?

Hmm, not sure what you read that I didn't mean to type there... I'd always say use LVM. I'm used to just using two partitions, /boot and LVM. You can get deeper into the principles of putting certain partitions in certain places on the physical disk, but at the partitioning level that's done me well over the last X years.

LVM is very helpful when you want to add new discs to an existing install and don't want to worry about where you mount it.
You can take some partitions and make it act like a single volume through LVM. Then you can increase or decrease the size of the volume. Suppose if your /home partition is getting full then you can add a partition or disk to the volume group, then expand the volume and resize the filesystem.

A okay, i guess i just got confused in the way you described LVM, as a minor cpu killer, i really dont want to compromise network speed on our gateways.. so i should install LVM on my machines, and transfear my data inside the Environment? (except /boot & Swap)?

the more i think about it, the more i want to try it out.. as we are currently running a non-raid system, and really want to setup raid 1 on our User Profiles.. well this weekend gonna be hard reading and VMware simulations i guess

Thats really all i want, it seems to good to be true, like a Harddisk Cloud, thats what i really like about it, and want to try it out, but i am a little scare about he performance i guess.. if our system is slow, i got phonecalls up my neck, and 2 angry bosses

Earlier I was also wondering about the performance issues of using lvm but later I came to know about this after reading this discussion. Maybe it can help in understanding the performance issues.

thanks for the link, very informative.. and i see thair consern about disk errors, and dataloss, however if i run a raid mirror, i can proberly secure that type of problem, on my user profile, and pxe images.. the gateways can go to hell, if they fail, easy to replace :P

read the link to compare between LVM and non-LVM , I cannot imagine linux without LVM, I have not had change to see how ZFS works but try using LVM from GUI and play with it, you will never run out of space again )
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...no-lvm-811853/

I didn't say that, I said some tests showed a *REDUCED* load with LVM in the equation. It appeared to make it work better, not worse.

omg i am so sorry, i was pretty tired when i asked, been geeking out all day, so i may have confused myself :P

Well thanks for all the help, its been very informative for me