Re: [gentoo-user] OT: Is EVMS dead?

[Adam Hamsik]

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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