NSS on LVM

By default is you create a NSS pool or volume, these are management by EVMS. EVMS is a disk manager original developed by IBM.
This is a quote about EVMS from the sourceforge website

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.

In 2006 IBM discontinued development of the project. There have been no further releases until know. Therefor Novell announced in 2008 that they will be moving from EVMS to LVM for NSS.

From OES2 it’s possible to run NSS on LVM with some with some disadvantages:

• no iManager support
• no NSS tools who uses EVMS (like software RAID and the creation, modifiying and deletion of patitions)
• no NSSMU support (the feature F4 update NDS works!)
• no Clustering

Advantages of NSS on LVM are:

• Better support of LVM in Linux
• Creation of a aligned partition (VMware)

So how can we create a NSS Pool with LVM?

1. Create a empty (aligned) partition with Yast
2. Create the NSS Pool
   mkfs -t nsspool -n nsspoolname devname
3. Create a directory for mouting the NSS Pool
   mkdir /mnt/pooldir
4. Mount the pool
   mount -t nsspool devname nsspoolmountpoint -o name=nsspoolname
5. Add the NSS pool to eDirectory
   NSSMU | Pools | F4 (NDS Update)
6. Add the NSS Pool mountpoint to the fstab file
   devname nsspoolmountpoint nsspool auto,rw,name=nsspoolname

And know the NSS  Volume

1. Create the NSS volume
   mkfs -t nssvol -n nssvolname nsspoolname
2. Create the mountpoint for the NSS volume
   mdkir /media/nss/nssvolname
3. Mount the NSS volume on the mountpoint
   mount -t nssvol nssvolname volmountpoint -o name=nssvolname
4. Update eDirectory
   NSSMU | Volume | F4 (NDS Update)
5. Add the NSS volume mountpoint to fstab file
   nssvolname nssvolumemountpoint nssvol auto,rw,name=nssvolname

Now you have a NSS Pool and Volume with LVM