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

[Albert Hopkins]

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.

Anyway YMMV.
--
Albert W. Hopkins

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