I was engaged as a contractor to help a major bank convert its servers from physical to virtual. It was 2010, when virtual was starting to eclipse physical. The consulting firm the bank hired to oversee the project had already decided that the conversions would be performed by a piece of software made by another company with whom the consulting firm was in bed.

I was brought in as a Linux expert, and told to, "make it work." The selected software, I found out without a lot of effort or exposure, eats shit. With whip cream. Part of the plan was to, "right-size" filesystems down to new desired sizes, and we found out that was one of the many things it could not do. Also, it required root SSH access to the server being converted. Just garbage.

I was very frustrated by the imposition of this terrible software, and started to butt heads with the consulting firm's project manager assigned to our team. Finally, during project planning meetings, I put together a P2V solution made with a customized Linux Rescue CD, perl, rsync, and LVM.

The selected software took about 45 minutes to do an initial conversion to the VM, and about 25 minutes to do a subsequent sync, which was part of the plan, for the final sync before cutover.

The tool I built took about 5 minutes to do the initial conversion, and about 30-45 seconds to do the final sync, and was able to satisfy every business requirement the selected software was unable to meet, and about which the consultants just shrugged.

The project manager got wind of this, and tried to get them to release my contract. He told management what I had built, against his instructions. They did not release my contract. They hired more people and assigned them to me to help build this tool.

They traveled to me and we refined it down to a simple portable ISO that remained in use as the default method for Linux for years after I left.

Fast forward to 2015. I'm interviewing for the position I have now, and one of the guys on the tech screen call says he worked for the same bank later and used that tool I wrote, and loved it. I think it was his endorsement that pushed me over and got me an offer for $15K more than I asked for.

After several long nights of learning to resize encrypted lvm partitions, fixing grub, finding screws, and waiting....

I finally managed to move my system files from the old drive to the new SSD.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

First day of holiday - manager messages that about small issues, ignored that.
Second day of holiday - received a message that everything is going wrong. Apparently I can't take any holidays as the world will burn in the meantime...

Linux software RAID and LVM are pretty powerful.

Bought a new server case for my home file server / VM host. 3U with 16 hotswap bays. Had 2x software RAID1 mirrors already with everything on them. Inserted 2 new disks with system running. Created new RAID10 array using these, with their mirrors as "missing".

Created new physical volume. Extended volume group into it, then used pvmove to transfer every logical volume across. Shrunk volume group to no longer use the old RAID1 array, disassembled that array, added its disks to the new array... Now just waiting for the mirror disks to sync up.

All this, with the system and several VMs still running.

And with a backup, of course ;)

Created Linux instalation flashdrive on my notebook like thousand times before. Simple dd if=img of=/dev/sdb . Tried installing system from it but somehow doesn't work. And the it hit me. I have both magmetic drive and SSD in my laptop! So insted of flashdrive, I have bootable beging of my SSD where my encrypted lvm used to be :-( Luckilly I lost just EFI, boot, swap, rootfs, few git repositories and ccache.

I really love Linux, but i GODDAMN HATE, how nearly no Distro supports installing it on a Custom LVM.
I mean, i just want to have a custom LVM, inside of an encrypted Partition in other Distros than Ubuntu, Debian or Opensuse.

LVM Insurance - Trusted by Linux-Users

By far the stupidest thing I've done while drunk is setting up a layered LVM-over-RAID1 + striped LVM storage system *and* managing not to lose any data.

Next time I ran `lsblk` and realized how that structure came to be I kinda turned white.

So today I set up an ubuntu server with LVM, encrypted root partition and decryption via usb key.

That shit is insane dude.

Can you give me some Distros, that allow me to install them in a custom LVM (like the Text-Based Ubuntu installer)?

Me: I want to make all our application directories a separate virtual disk for easy resizeability

Project lead: Why? We have lvm!

I might stab somebody, myself included.

Anyone using btrfs in production?
I hated lvm/lvm2 with a passion, and really enjoying how btrfs makes things easy for you.

So it's been almost a whole day and I've still not managed to Install Arch with LUKS/LVM and grub2. Time to give up? Yes.

So... I've been thinking, I tend to default to LVM when trying to create easy-to-manage disk partitions, or when I want to backup a database without long lockings during a dump... Though, now... I got thinking.

What do you guys think, which is better in terms of functionality: BtrFS or LVM?

I know BtrFS offers such thing like full snapshots that allow to easily transfer just the increment over the snapshot origin off to a remote server for archival, but I never fully grew to trust btrfs as a server filesystem... Its...

Younger, and not as widespread, not to mention I don't know any performance statistics to recommend its use for this or that case (Like... Would a high-load database engine stutter flushing all those changes on disk while reading / writing temp tables and such)

Trying to install Ubuntu and just wondering which is better?
Encrypt for security
Erase and Install
Use LVM

OMG
LVM
WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP

It's so precious that when it detects an existing mdraid signature, it just *won't* let me create a physical volume over it!

No matter that I run pvcreate with double-force switch.
It doesn't matter that the system doesn't even have a single MD device defined (Which can be easily checked in /proc/mdstat OR by checking the /dev subsystem)

I *hate* commands that are trying to be more clever than the admin sitting behind the keyboard.

Sure, leave this as the default behavior (It could save a lot of people's data I bet), but BLOODY HELL GIVE ME A SWITCH TO OVERRIDE THE CHECK YOU DUMBASS.

I swear... I feel like I'll get a frickin' brain hemorrhage from this "clever tool" -_-"