Managing Logical Volumes
If you create your filesystems using standard partitions on hard drives, trying to add additional space to an existing filesystem can be somewhat of a painful experience. You can only expand a partition to the extent of the available space on the same physical hard drive. If no more space is available on that hard drive, you're stuck having to get a larger hard drive and manually moving the existing filesystem to the new drive.
What would come in handy is a way to dynamically add more space to an existing filesystem by just adding a partition from another hard drive to the existing filesystem. The Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) software package allows you to do just that. It provides an easy way for you to manipulate disk space on a Linux system without having to rebuild entire filesystems.
Exploring logical volume management layout
The core of logical volume management is how it handles the physical hard drive partitions installed on the system. In...
