Enterprise Volume Management System
Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS) is a flexible, integrated volume management software used to manage storage systems under Linux.
Its features include:
- Handle EVMS, Linux LVM and LVM2 volumes
- Handle many kinds of disk partitioning schemes
- Handle many different file systems (Ext2, Ext3, FAT, JFS, NTFS, OCFS2, OpenGFS, ReiserFS, Swap, XFS etc.)
- Multi-disk (MD) management
- Software RAID: level 0, 1, 4 and 5
- Drive linking (device concatenation)
- Multipath I/O support
- Manage shared cluster storage
- Expand and shrink volumes and file systems online or offline (depending on the file system's capabilities)
- Snapshots (frozen images of volumes), optionally writable
- Conversion between different volume types
- Move partitions
- Make, check and repair file systems
- Bad block relocation
- Three types of user interface: GUI, text mode interface and CLI
- Backup and restore the EVMS metadata
EVMS is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.
LVM vs EVMS
For a while, both LVM and EVMS were competing for inclusion in the mainline kernel. EVMS had more features and better userland tools, but the internals of LVM were more attractive to kernel developers, so in the end LVM one the battle for inclusion. In response, the EVMS team decided to concentrate on porting the EVMS userland tools to work with the LVM kernelspace.