Exploring Logical Volume Management

The Logical Volume Management helps in the partition of your hard drives during the Red Hat Installation. Once the hard drives are partitioned there is no easy to expand the preallocated space.

Lets take a practical example, suppose you have set up the /home directory in a separate partition. You have planned and assumed that it will be enough for 10 users but now your company expands and suddenly, now you need space for 20 users. Now Without LVM , there is no easy way to expand the size of the /home partition. Now you need to back up the files of /home, find a partition with space, and than restore the files to that partition.

LVM allows you to reallocate chunks of disk space between different filesystem. So with LVM, if you have extra space in filesystem such as /var, you can reallocate that space to /home.

LVM volume group can be created at the installation time of Red Hat Linux.