Enterprise Volume Management System

Enterprise Volume Management System was a flexible, integrated volume management software used to manage storage systems under Linux.
Its features include:

Handle EVMS, [Logical Volume Manager (Linux)|Linux Logical Volume Manager (Linux)|LVM and LVM2] volumes
Handle many kinds of disk partitioning schemes
Handle many different file systems
Multi-disk management
Software RAID: level 0, 1, 4 and 5
Drive linking
Multipath I/O support
Manage shared cluster storage
Expand and shrink volumes and file systems online or offline
Snapshots, 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. EVMS is supported now in some Linux distributions, among others it is now SUSE, Debian and Gentoo

WWW evms.sourceforge.net

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 won the battle for inclusion. In response, the EVMS team decided to concentrate on porting the EVMS userland tools to work with the LVM kernelspace.
Sometime after the release of version 2.5.5 on February 26, 2006, IBM discontinued development of the project. There have been no further releases. In 2008 Novell announced that the company would be moving from EVMS to LVM in future editions of their SUSE products, while continuing to fully support customers using EVMS.