The Enterprise Volume Management System, or EVMS, is a disk, partition, and file system manager for Linux that claims to be a comprehensive tool for all disk management tasks. I ran across EVMS and found the idea appealing, so I decided to try it out. I've been working with it for a couple of weeks now, and this article describes what I found.
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The instalation part wasn't that long, "emerge evms && env-update && source /etc/profile" did it,made a link to evmsgui in .fluxbox/keys and pressed Mod1+1.Interesting program to play with,can save me a lot of time.
Very interesting.
I'll have to read the doc carefully, the action menu have some sweet options.
Yanik
IIRC there were lengthy discussions about including EVMS or LVM2 in the 2.6 kernel because both of them were quite similar and people didn't know what one choose. LVM2 won, and it's included in standard 2.6 kernels, and installers (redhat, fedora, ubuntu i think) all use LVM. Is there any reason for not to use LVM instead of EVMS?
I though LVM was the main player now for production use, with EVMS becoming a sort of development/testing/experimentation type project.
Nice job Andrew - very well written article. It will take some time before EVMS is fully adopted in enterprise linux - but does anyone remember the days before LVM/LVM2? It's only a matter of time guys ...
Milione
> IIRC there were lengthy discussions about including EVMS
> or LVM2 in the 2.6 kernel because both of them were quite
> similar and people didn't know what one choose. LVM2 won,
> and it's included in standard 2.6 kernels, and installers
> (redhat, fedora, ubuntu i think) all use LVM. Is there any
> reason for not to use LVM instead of EVMS?
OK, I wasn't aware of those discussions. EVMS provides an interface to all of the capabilities of LVM/LVM2, as well as partitioning tools, software RAID, and a few other goodies. Even if you're mainly using LVM, it's a nice interface to it, IMO. Andrew.
IK had written an article on LVM quite a while back you can read it here -> http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue84/vinayak.html
IIRC, when it was decided to go with LVM2 the IBM/EVMS guys gracefully dropped their low-level kernel DM implementation and focused on the middleware that now is EVMS.
- Peder
> IRC there were lengthy discussions about including EVMS or
> LVM2 in the 2.6 kernel
LVM2 and EVMS2 both run in userspace. They both depend on the device mapper which is part of the kernel. Thus I don't think there is any discussion to include LVM2 and EVMS2 into the kernel (again). LVM1 and EVMS1 where in the kernel space but that was considered bad and they were banned to user space.
"What EVMS Does"
-> Snapshots?
For backups this is a feature that interests me a lot... Why isn't it mentioned? Is it for example possible with LVM? Maybe it doesn't work as wanted yet?
Well... lots of questions, but I like the "can do"-summary in the article 
.
Thanks, nice article.
A while ago I used the new Debian Installer to set up a system using LVM2 on top of RAID-1, and was extremely pleased with how straightforward the process was. Given how cheap HDs are these days, I would highly recommend this combination for redundancy and flexibility. I even considered writing an article to submit to OSNews about the experience, but never got off my duff to write it 
. But maybe EVMS is even better.
I'll consider giving EVMS a try - I think my existing setup gives me most of the functionality I want, but it would be nice to have a centralized "control center" for LVM and RAID operations.
p.s. - thanks for the extremely useful guide on getting nVidia's accelerated drivers working in Debian. I refer to it every time dist-upgrade kicks nvidia-glx to a higher version number.