LVM is a linux storage solution and here is the link for a beginner's howto:
1 LVM Overview
The Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is a mechanism for virtualizing disks. It can create "virtual" disk partitions out of one or more physical hard drives, allowing you to grow, shrink, or move those partitions from drive to drive as your needs change. It also allows you to create larger partitions than you could achieve with a single drive.
2 LVM Layout
Basically LVM looks like this:
3 Show Disk Partitions
Show the partitions of the hard disks:
fdisk -l
4 Create Physical Volumes and Display them
Create the physical volumes on the disk partitions:
pvcreate /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc3
pvdisplay
5 Create Volume Groups and Other Operations for them
Create a volume group named "filevg" on the physical volumes, then show/rename/remove it:
vgcreate filevg /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc3
vgdisplay
vgrename filevg datavg
vgscan
vgremove datavg
6 Operations of Logical Volumes
Next we create our logical volumes share (40GB), backup (5GB), and media (1GB) in the volume group fileserver. Together they use a little less than 50% of the available space (that way we can make use of RAID1 later on):
lvcreate --name share --size 40G fileserver
lvcreate --name backup --size 5G fileserver
lvcreate --name media --size 1G fileserver
lvdisplay; lvscan; lvrename; lvextend; lvreduce;
7 Build File Systems and Mount the Logical Volumes
Build three file systems on above created logical volumes:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/fileserver/share
mkfs.xfs /dev/fileserver/backup
mkfs.reiserfs /dev/fileserver/media
Now we are ready to mount our logical volumes. I want to mount share in /var/share, backup in /var/backup, and media in /var/media, therefore we must create these directories first:
mkdir /var/media /var/backup /var/share
Now we can mount our logical volumes:
mount /dev/fileserver/share /var/share
mount /dev/fileserver/backup /var/backup
mount /dev/fileserver/media /var/media
Now try to use them as normal file systems.