It can be said as a thin software layer on top of the hard drives and partitions, which creates illusion of continuity and easy of use for managing hard drives replacement, re-partitioning and backups.

It’s common usages are to manage large drives farm by adding a disk, replacing a disk, copy and share the disks without interrupting services running. For small setups there is no need to worry about partition size offering for requirements in future as disks partition can be re-sized easily on run-time, further making backups by taking snapshots and creating single logical volume of multiple physical volumes or entire hard disks functionality is also available.

Features of LVM

• Re-size volume groups
• Re-size logical volumes
• Create read-only snapshot – LVM1
• Create read-write snapshot – LVM2
• Strips whole or parts of logical volumes (similar Raid0)
• Mirror whole or parts of logical volumes (similar Raid1)
• Move online logical volumes
• Split or merge volume groups

Almost features can be performed online without disrupting users.