HP-UX 11i System Administration Handbook and Toolkit, Second Edition

Logical Volume Manager Background

Logical Volume Manager is a disk management subsystem that allows you to manage physical disks as logical volumes. This means that a file system can span multiple physical disks. You can view Logical Volume Manager as a flexible way of defining boundaries of disk space that are independent of one another. Not only can you specify the size of a logical volume, but you can also change its size if the need arises. This possibility is a great advancement over dedicating a disk to a filesystem or having fixed-size partitions on a disk. Logical volumes can hold filesystems, raw data, or swap space. You can now specify a logical volume to be any size you wish, have logical volumes that span multiple physical disks, ...