The Enterprise Volume Management System [LWN.net]

The Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS) is an open-source data storage system that has been developed at IBM, it has been released under the GNU General Public License, version 2.

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.

EVMS has been designed to work with a large number of existing storage management systems on a number of different operating system platforms, it also supports all of the common Linux filesystem types. Management of EVMS can be performed with a gtk-based GUI, a curses-based terminal mode, and a command line mode. The EVMS User Guide has examples of the various interfaces, in addition to a lot of additional information.

Further information on the inner workings of EVMS can be had from the EVMS 2.0 Architecture Overview and the EVMS Cluster Design Document.

Version 2.1.1 of EVMS has been announced this week. It is a maintenance release that features a few bug fixes and support for the latest version of Device-Mapper.

If you have a need for managing large amounts of data, EVMS is worth checking out.

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