Does Red Hat recommend to use lvm volume or physical partitions for filesystems?

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 SOLUTION 已验证 - 已更新 2015年十一月16日20:38 - 

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环境

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6, 7

问题

• Does Red Hat recommend to use lvm volume or physical partitions for filesystems? Please share information on advantages, disadvantages of using lvm volumes and physical partitions for root/non-root filesystem.

决议

• When the root or any non-root filesystem is created using lvm volumes, administrator could easily expand or reduce it's size. The physical volumes used by lvm volumes could reside on a whole disk or partitions. An administrator could add additional disk or partition as a physical volume and newly added physical volumes could be used to extend the size of lvm volume, root, non-root filesystem at run-time, without any downtime.

  Please refer to the following link in LVM administration guide for detailed information about the features in LVM:

  o ⁠1.2. Logical Volumes
  (Note: It is supported to use lvm volumes for all the filesystems except /boot.)

• Resizing the non lvm, physical partition on disk device involves potential risk of data & partition table corruption, so the procedure to resize filesystems present on non-lvm, physical partitions is not supported, this applies for both root, non-root partitions. While it is not supported to resize physical partition on disk devices, there is following knowledge base article which provides information about how to resize a non-lvm, physical partition on disk. Please note that Red Hat does not provide any official solution on extending and resizing non-lvm, physical partition. The following solution is only for reference and administrators could use it on their own risk:

  o How can I extend an existing non-lvm partition without destroying data?

• Also, if there is any misconfiguration or issue occurred with underlying disk devices, then there is still a chance to restore the old lvm volume layout from backup lvm metadata copies and try to restore the lvm and filesystem state. The chances or full lvm and filesystem recovery would depend upon the issues experienced by system, and we may not be able to restore the complete lvm volume, filesystem in all scenarios, but while using lvm volumes we could definitely try and restore the filesystem.

  But if the root filesystem is created over physical partitions, and there is any issue with partition table, or partition table is corrupt, partition is lost due to crash or unexpected problem, then it would be very hard for to recreate the same partition layout and restore the filesystem.

• So, it is recommended to please try to use the lvm volume for root/non-root filesystems whenever possible.