One of the great strengths of the Linux operating system is its support for a wide variety of filesystem types.
Users now have the choice of using several different production-level filesystems.
One capability that has been missing, however, is the ability to arbitrarily combine distinct disk partitions into a single filesystem. Conceptually, the LVM allows you to combine and divide physical disk partitions in a completely flexible manner. The resulting filesystems are dynamically resizable, and their maximum size can exceed 1,000 terabytes. Figure One illustrates the operations of the LVM in a high-level conceptual manner. These partitions are each designated to the LVM as physical volumes.