Utilizing LVM

The needs of your organization will change with time. While we as server administrators always do our best to configure resources with long-term growth in mind, budgets and changes in policy always seem to get in our way. LVM is something that I’m sure you’ll come to appreciate. In fact, technologies such as LVM are those things that make Linux the champion when it comes to scalability and cloud deployments. With LVM, you are able to resize your filesystems online, without needing to reboot your server.

Take the following scenario for example. Say you have an application running on a virtualized production server—a server that’s so important that downtime would cost your organization serious money. When the server was first set up, perhaps you gave the application’s storage directory a 100 GB partition, thinking it would never need more than that. Now, with your business growing, it’s not only using a lot of space, but you...