[3][4][5] Heinz Mauelshagen wrote the original LVM code in 1998, when he was working at Sistina Software, taking its primary design guidelines from the HP-UX's volume manager.

The LVM also works in a shared-storage cluster in which disks holding the PVs are shared between multiple host computers, but can require an additional daemon to mediate metadata access via a form of locking.

For example, even if a LV has a policy of cling, expanding the file system will not result in LVM using a PV if it is already used by one of the other legs in the RAID setup.

Each PV's header is a complete copy of the entire volume group's layout, including the UUIDs of all other PVs and of LVs, and allocation map of PEs to LEs.

Any LVM-specific code is pushed out into its user-space tools, which merely manipulate these mappings and reconstruct their state from on-disk metadata upon each invocation.