On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 18:01 -0500, Eric S. Johansson wrote: > > given that I frequently play the role of the heretic (complete with burn > scars > all over my body and various bits of damage from the weapons of true > believers) > I think it's a good thing that EVMS is slated for the trash heap. It's a > classic example of "second system syndrome" as defined by "the mythical Man > month". It's overly complicated, poorly documented, and has a terrible user > interface that only a geek would even consider using. > > Having said that, I also think LVMS suffers from many if not all of the same > problems that plagued EVMS. it is been around for years and still the > documentation on how to perform common operations is lacking. It's a chicken > and egg problem. You need to understand LVMS in order to understand the > documentation and then you can't explain it to anyone else. Every time I've > used LVMS, it takes me the same number of hours to relearn the same old > pieces > of obscure command syntax and become comfortable that I'm not going to trash > my > disk. As a result, I don't use LVMS either. > I've never used EVMS so I can't comment at all on it. However I have been using LVM for years and one of the few good things I can say about it is that its pretty small, easy, and predictable. In fact one of the negative things I'd have to say about it is that it's *too* simple (a LV defrag tool would be nice). I really don't understand the complexity you speak of. It's pretty well documented, and has a fairly high user-base.
I do agree though that, based on this ML and IRC discussions, many times I'll see a person who wants to use LVM and perhaps maybe they don't need it, and they get frustrated because they're using the wrong tool for the job. Myself: I have a 8 2-disk RAID volumes with LVM on top. If I need to expand my VG, I just pop in a couple of new drives, to an lvextend on a volume and then "mount -o remount,resize" and voila! On another machine I have xen and I have 2 VGs: a set of disks for the Host and a set for the VMs. I have some VMs in a DMZ, and I can't reach them from the host, but I use LVM to create snapshots of their disks and make backup of them. LVM makes it damn easy. In some ways LVM is like a poor-man's SAN for Xen VMs. You can carve out a LV, assign it to a VM, and resize, hot-add or hot-remove them as you please. But again, the average person with a single disk running on a laptop computer probably has no use for LVM. Pretty much every major "server" OS has volume management (including Windows) because a lot of users at that level need it. Linu LVM, I think, is very similar to HP-UX LVM at the command level. Anyway YMMV. -- Albert W. Hopkins -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
