[sclug] What to use LVM for

[Chris Aitken]

> Thinking of how to partition my new 300G hdd for my desktop 
> I'm wondering about LVM. It seems I could add the whole drive 
> to a volume group and allocate all my partitions out of that. 
> Is it safe/possible to do this for my root and swap partions 
> as well as /home and any others or should I have those as old 
> fashioned cast-in-stone partitions?
> 
> And if so how does one set up LVM when doing a debian (sarge) 
> install? I can't remember (and don't yet have a machine handy 
> to try it on) if LVM is an option during the install process. 
> Will there be anything machine-specific I'll wish I'd found 
> out before starting the installation? :-)

I wouldn't put the root partition on the LVM. Mainly because that needs an
initrd, and I couldn't be arsed with that.
The server here has a large partition that is a Volume Group (VG). It holds
3 Logical Volumes (LV): home_lv, tmp_lv and mail_lv (mounted at /home, /var
& /var/mail respectively.

I set the server up manually, so once it had installed, I rebooted into
single user mode, then moved the respective directories to their
filesystems.

As an aside, the VG exists on it's own RAID1 partition. /var, /root & /swap
also have their own non-LVM RAID1 partitions.

TBH, I'd stick it all in the LVM, bar root and swap. Swap doesn't seem such
an issue now, especially with the price of RAM.

HTH
Chris


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