LVM2 tools update

The Logical Volume Manager allows the user to manage available disk space effectively and efficiently. Disk space from several disks, and partitions are made available as volume groups, and then logical volumes can be created from those volume groups. The effect of this is to allow file systems to be created and manipulated on top of storage which can be extended or reduced as required.

The NetBSD LVM uses same tools as Linux (except for the kernel portions, which were implemented independently with a BSD license). Because of the re-use of the tools, administrators familiar with the LVM tools on Linux are able to use NetBSD systems directly with no further training needed. There is already a large amount of documentation, tutorials and other supporting documents available for using and administering LVM.

While the normal volume management use cases are very applicable with LVM, such as large disks, RAID system management, volume growth and shrinkage, one area that is often overlooked is NetBSD/Xen. On such servers logical partitions can be created for each domU system; there is no need to use files or vnd configurations for domU storage. Logical volume management for virtualized domains reduces overhead, uses less disk space, and is more efficient.