Logical volume management

Logical volume management is a hard disk drive partitioning scheme that is designed to be more flexible than normal physical partitioning. In particular, logical volume management software allows for changes in the size of individual filesystems without a hard reboot of the computer, and in some cases while the filesystem is actively being used.

A few operating systems have incorporated logical volume management in their design, such as Linux and AIX.

Linux kernel 2.4 contains LVM version 1, and kernel 2.6 contains LVM version 2.