LVM is an old favorite among HP-UX administrators. As a disk management product, it has most features you could ask for. It offers mirroring, striping, and concurrent access (shared volume groups); if your applications can cope with it, it supports rootability on all platforms as well as capabilities to support clustering. What are its failings?
LVM doesn't support software RAID 5.
LVM doesn't really support RAID 0/1 except in a compromise scenario.
LVM doesn't support multiple, concurrent links to disks. (PV Links only provide failover, not load balancing.)
LVM doesn't have an intuitive GUI. (SAM doesn't count.)
There is the problem of portability between operating systems, although with LVM now in the Linux community, this failing is becoming less and less.
Lastly, LVM doesn't easily allow for forward compatibility with newer /bigger disk drives .
Failures relating to RAID levels are often brushed aside with comments such as: " If you want that level of high-availability and performance, buy yourself a disk array. " If you accept these failings, there are few reasons to not use LVM.
