On Nov,Tuesday 6 2007, at 3:07 AM, Albert Hopkins wrote:
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.
AFAIK an who has written linux LVM worked for HP.
Regards
Adam.
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