Enterprise Volume Management System

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The Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS) Project has the goal of providing unparalleled flexibility and extensibility in managing storage. It represents a new approach to logical volume management for Linux. The architecture introduces a plug-in model that allows for easy expansion and customization of various levels of volume management.

EVMS provides a single, unified system for handling all of your storage management tasks. EVMS recognizes all of the disks on your system and allows for a variety of partitioning schemes. Software-RAID and logical volume groups can be managed in EVMS. Filesystems can be created and checked, and are automatically updated when changes are made to the underlying volumes. With EVMS, there is no longer a need for several individual utilities for performing each of these tasks.

The current stable version of EVMS is 2.5.5. It was released on February 26, 2006.

EVMS is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.

In order to make the transition to EVMS as smooth as possible, EVMS includes compatibility with a number of existing storage and volume management systems. Currently, EVMS recognizes:

• All locally attached disks
• DOS-style disk partitions (used extensively on Linux systems)
• GPT disk partitions (mainly used on IA-64)
• S/390 disk partitions (CDL/LDL)
• BSD disk partitions
• Macintosh disk partitions
• Linux MD/Software-RAID devices
• Linux LVM volume groups and logical volumes (versions 1 and 2)

In addition to providing compatibility with these existing systems, EVMS also provides new functionality that can be built on top of any of the above "volumes" that EVMS already recognizes. Features that are currently included are:

• Bad Block Relocation
• Linear Drive Linking
• Generic Snapshotting

In addition to these volume-level features, the EVMS tools provide convenient integration with numerous filesystem tools, to allow tasks such as mkfs and fsck directly from the EVMS user interfaces. Currently, the following filesystems are supported:

• Ext2/3
• JFS
• ReiserFS
• XFS
• Swap
• OCFS2
• NTFS
• FAT

EVMS comes with several different user interfaces, to appeal to a wide variety of users:

• GUI: gtk-based UI for use with graphical desktops.
• Text-Mode: ncurses-based terminal UI with the same look-and-feel as the GUI.
• Command-Line: shell-style UI to provide scripting functionality.