[rhelv6-beta-list] My first experiences with RHEL6 beta

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, R P Herrold <herrold at owlriver.com> said:
> This misses the point.  It is not a lack of 'enlightenment' at 
> all.  LVM is 'ignored' (removed from consideration, actually) 
> because it tries to replace a robust and understood tool with 
> a perhaps more capable one, at the expense of adding 
> complexity to a system.  The 'value proposition' fails in 
> readily understood use cases

There are a couple of issues that make LVM less-useful than it could be:

- Lack of advanced tools: Bryan mentioned moving PEs around, but right
  now that's a PITA.  If you want to "defrag" your LVs, you have to
  manually remap PEs; there is no nice tool to do this.  The LVM tools
  look pretty much the same way they did years ago when they were
  introduced, and there hasn't been much work on higher-level tools or
  integration with other higher-level tools.

- Lack of integration with the filesystem: I know the kernel folks
  fought any integration between LVM and FSs as a layering violation,
  but it can be much more useful that way.  For example, on Tru64 with
  AdvFS (with some LVM-like functionality integrated into the
  filesystem), snapshots don't require additional disk space (over what
  is already allocated to the filesystem).  If a snapshot needs space,
  it uses free space in the filesystem being snapshotted.  This has its
  own trade-offs of course, but is very useful.

  I understand that btrfs is going to have this type of integration
  between the filesystem and logical storage management.  I think this
  is really the way to go long-term; kernel folks may like block devices
  and filesystems to be separate, but admins and users just want
  easily-managed disk space.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.