Implementations
| Vendor | Introduced in | Volume manager | Allocate anywhere | Snapshots | RAID 0 | RAID 1 | RAID 5 | RAID 10 | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IBM | AIX 3.0 (1989) | Logical Volume Manager | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Refers to PEs as PPs (physical partitions), and to LEs as LPs (logical partitions). Does not have a copy-on-write snapshot mechanism; creates snapshots by freezing one volume of a mirror pair. |
| Hewlett-Packard | HP-UX 9.0 | HP Logical Volume Manager | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | |
| FreeBSD | Vinum Volume Manager | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | FreeBSD from version 7.0 supports ZFS volume Manager (with some limitations): ZFS - FreeBSD Wiki | ||
| NetBSD | Logical Volume Manager | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | NetBSD from version 6.0 supports ZFS volume Manager and its own re-implementation of Linux LVM. Re-implementation is based on a BSD licensed device-mapper driver and uses a port of Linux lvm tools as the userspace part of LVM. There is no need to support RAID5 in LVM because of NetBSD superior RAIDFrame subsystem. | |
| Linux 2.2 | Logical Volume Manager | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | |||
| Linux 2.4 | Enterprise Volume Management System | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
| Linux 2.6 | Logical Volume Manager | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | |||
| Silicon Graphics | IRIX or Linux | XVM Volume Manager | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Sun Microsystems | SunOS | Solaris Volume Manager (was Solstice DiskSuite). | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Refers to PVs as volumes (which can be combined with RAID0, RAID1 or RAID5 primitives into larger volumes), to LVs as soft partitions (which are contiguous extents placeable anywhere on volumes, but which cannot span multiple volumes), and to VGs as disk sets. |
| Sun Microsystems | Solaris 10 | ZFS | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Veritas | Cross-OS | Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Refers to LVs as volumes, to VGs as disk groups; has variably-sized PEs called subdisks and LEs called plexes. |
| Microsoft | Windows 2000 and later NT-based operating systems | Logical Disk Manager | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Does not have a concept of PEs or LEs; can only RAID0, RAID1, RAID5 or concatenate disk partitions into larger volumes; file systems must span whole volumes. |
| Windows 8 | Storage Spaces | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | Higher-level logic than RAID1 and RAID5 - multiple storage spaces span multiple disks of different size, storage spaces are resilient from physical failure with either mirroring (at least 2 disks) or striped parity (at least 3 disks), disk management and data recovery is fully automatic | |
| Apple | Mac OS X Lion | Core Storage | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | Currently, it is only used in Lion's implementation of FileVault, in order to allow for full disk encryption. Snapshots are handled by Time Machine; Software-based RAID is provided by AppleRAID. Both are separate from Core Storage. |
Read more about this topic: Logical Volume Management