Getting to know logical volume management (LVM)

I hate to apply terms like new to technology that was in use by the late 1980s but compared to most concepts in computer storage logical volume management (LVM) is pretty new and is far less known than most other standard storage technologies to the majority of system administrators. LVMs were relegated to extremely high-end server systems prior to Linux introducing the first widely available product in 1998 and Microsoft following suit in 2000. Today LVMs are ubiquitous and available, often natively and by default, on most operating systems.

An LVM is the primary storage virtualization technology in use today. An LVM allows us to take an arbitrary number of block devices (meaning one or more, generally called physical volumes) and combine, split, or otherwise modify them and present them as an arbitrary number of block devices (generally called logical volumes) to the system. This might sound complex, but it really is not. A practical...