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> I understand that, but what I don not understant yet
> is the "Often we can't extend the end of the
> partition"
most of the time we deal with actual disks, not virtual disks ala SAN LUN's. SAN LUN's are no different than LVM's logical volumes. What you do with your EMC software when creating or extending a LUN is not one bit different from using fdisk to define new physical partitions on physical drives, creating PV's and VG's and then defining LV's. It just happens without you having to issue all those commands or know what's really going on inside. With a SAN, LVM is already happening and transparently to you. So layering on more LVM isn't very productive. UNLESS, you decide to treat the LUN like a physical disk and carve it into various partitions. In which case we're back to square 1.
Only when dealing with actual, raw hard drives (or hardware RAID volumes), or carved up LUNs do you run into the problem of 2 partitions butted up against one other and the inability to grow the earlier one because growing it necessarily means overwriting the one behind it. Tools like Partition Magic have been around for quite some time and they are quite capable of moving partitions around the physical disk, but that generally take a lot of downtime.
> If I can't grow a LUN because the neighbors are too
> close, the LVM is the way to go :-)
You can grow a LUN any which way you want and it doesn't matter to machines that want to use it as a disk. It's only when you start partitioning that LUN into more than 1 slice that you run afoul of the partition boundaries getting in the way. I would just create a LUN for each specific task (say your common GFS area) and when you run out of space, grow the LUN, grow the partition, and then grow the FS.
In my lab I'm running a poor man's SAN - siz 72GB drives in Raid10 and RAID5 exported via iSCSI. Each machine gets their own scribble space and so I need to partition the RAID logical drive accordingly. If I used hard partitions it would be impossible to change space allocation later so I use LVM to give each machine it's own partition. and if I need to change it, I can do so trivially. As far as the client machines are concerned they are dealing with their very own drive and have no idea I'm giving them space that could be scattered all over the place. If I partition the iSCSI LUN on the client, then I either treat it as raw disk and run the risk of sizing stuff wrong, create just a single partition, or virtualize it again using client LVM.
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