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Chapter 1. The LVM Logical Volume Manager
2
1.2. LVM Architecture Overview
For the RHEL 4 release of the Linux operating system, the original LVM1 logical volume manager
was replaced by LVM2, which has a more generic kernel framework than LVM1. LVM2 provides the
following improvements over LVM1:
• flexible capacity
• more efficient metadata storage
• better recovery format
• new ASCII metadata format
• atomic changes to metadata
• redundant copies of metadata
LVM2 is backwards compatible with LVM1, with the exception of snapshot and cluster support. You
can convert a volume group from LVM1 format to LVM2 format with the
vgconvert
command. For
information on converting LVM metadata format, see the
vgconvert
(8) man page.
The underlying physical storage unit of an LVM logical volume is a block device such as a partition or
whole disk. This device is initialized as an LVM
physical volume
(PV).
To create an LVM logical volume, the physical volumes are combined into a
volume group
(VG). This
creates a pool of disk space out of which LVM logical volumes (LVs) can be allocated. This process
is analogous to the way in which disks are divided into partitions. A logical volume is used by file
systems and applications (such as databases).
Figure 1.1, “LVM Logical Volume Components”
shows the components of a simple LVM logical
volume:
Figure 1.1. LVM Logical Volume Components
For detailed information on the components of an LVM logical volume, see
Chapter 2, LVM
Components
.