A volume group can be compared to a virtual partition and is composed of one or more physical volumes forming a single storage pool available for the system.

One or several physical volumes comprise a volume group. Physical volumes are essentially conventional disk partitions or whole storage devices like internal or external hard disk drives, software- or hardware-based RAID systems, etc. The fundamental storage structures it relies on include: However, in contrast to the traditional disk management model, in which each storage device is represented by a single or several partitions, logical volumes in LVM are not tied this way to particular digital media: one volume can spread over many drives and be resized or removed any time on the fly. Logical Volume Manager serves a layer of abstraction between the operating system and the physical disks it makes use of.

Let’s go through the key concepts of Logical Volume Manager, its basic architecture, strengths and shortcomings. Although this technology is particularly beneficial in a corporate setting, with the considerably increasing storage needs of home users, it is getting commonly employed on desktop PCs as well while more and more Linux installations enable this component by default. Providing enhanced flexibility, this storage configuration method is widely utilized by system administrators for various server, NAS and SAN systems running Linux as the means of organizing storage space with maximum efficiency. It has been included into the Linux kernel since 1999 and relying on its device mapper framework, is now supported by every modern distribution. Logical Volume Manager is a disk management option which enables spanning partitions across multiple physical devices and allows for easy partition resizing. The basic architecture of Linux LVM and prospects for data recovery

The basic architecture of Linux LVM and prospects for data recovery.

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