Configuring and managing logical volumes

Logical volume management (LVM) creates a layer of abstraction over physical storage to create a logical storage volume, which is a virtual block storage device that a file system, database, or application can use. The physical volume (PV) is either a partition or a whole disk. By using these PVs, you can create a volume group (VG) to create a pool of disk space for the logical volumes (LV) from the available storage.

You can create a logical volume (LV) by combining physical volumes into a volume group. LV provides more flexibility than using physical storage, and the created LVs can be extended or reduced without repartitioning or reformatting the physical device.

You can also perform several advanced operations with the LVM, such as creating thin-provisioned logical volumes, snapshots of the original volume, RAID volumes, cache volumes, and striped logical volumes.