One of the great strengths of the Linux operating system is its support for a wide variety of filesystem types. Users now have the choice of using several different production-level filesystems. For example, the recently released Reiser filesystem (reiserfs) has generated considerable interest and excitement among Linux users and system administrators.
Figure One: You can use Logical Volume Manager to combine physical disk partitions and create rather large and resizable filesystems.
One of the great strengths of the Linux operating system is its support for a wide variety of filesystem types. Users now have the choice of using several different production-level filesystems. For example, the recently released Reiser filesystem (reiserfs) has generated considerable interest and excitement among Linux users and system administrators.
Similarly, the Linux software RAID facility is in wide-use by sites needing a low-cost solution for fault-tolerance or higher performance disk I/O (via RAID-0 disk stripping). One capability that has been missing, however, is the ability to arbitrarily combine distinct disk partitions into a single filesystem.
This omission is addressed by the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM), which is coming into production readiness at the time of this writing. The LVM project has been in existence for several years (its homepage can be found at http://linux.msede.com/lvm), and support for the LVM has been recently merged into the latest versions of the Linux kernel. Veritas will offer a commercial product with similar facilities for Linux sometime later this year (see http://www.veritas.com/us/aboutus/pressroom/2000/00-01-24-0.html for more information).
Conceptually, the LVM allows you to combine and divide physical disk partitions in a…
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