For the BALUG May 17th meeting, we will feature a presentation on Logical Volume Manager (LVM) on LINUX by Michael Paoli.

BALUG and meeting general information (location, time, dinner cost, etc.) can be found on the BALUG web site: http://www.balug.org/

About Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and the presentation: LVM allows for rather powerful and flexible management of hard drive space. Rather than mostly having to deal with physical disks and partitions, with LVM, one creates logical volumes, which can then be used to contain filesystems or other data. With logical volumes, one can relocate and resize logical volumes while the data they contain is in use, and in general, without regard to partition boundaries or disk sizes - as logical volumes can also span multiple disks. This can make LVM a very power tool, for example allowing one to: * grow a filesystem while it's in use (if the filesystem type supports growing it on-line) * relocate in-use data (filesystem or whatever) to different physical device or type of storage (for example, take a filesystem that is in use and move it between different types of storage (e.g. among non-RAID, RAID-5, RAID-1 or RAID-0+1 devices)) * more efficiently manage multiple filesystems on systems from those with large numbers of disk storage arrays through those with as little as a single hard drive The presentation also promises to include a live demonstration of use of LVM on LINUX, and also a bit of information about volume management software in general on LINUX and UNIX platforms.

About Michael Paoli, our presenter for this event: Michael Paoli has been doing UNIX systems administration for well over a decade, has been using volume management software for about 9 years, has been using doing LINUX systems administration for almost 7 years, and has been using LVM on LINUX for about 2 years.