Hi.
Quote:
Using the whole disk as a PV (as opposed to a partition spanning the whole disk) is not recommended because of the management issues it can create. Any other OS that looks at the disk will not recognize the LVM metadata and display the disk as being free, so it is likely it will be overwritten. LVM itself will work fine with whole disk PVs.
From the topic at
Initializing disks or disk partitions
Note, however, that the HOWTO is years old. I don't know whether there is newer advice. The advice above still seems to make sense to me.
In my situation, I place a single partition on a disk, then incorporate that into a RAID1 (or RAID10 if I have enough disks), then I place LVM on top of that.
Perhaps someone will stop by with additional information.
Best wishes ... cheers, drl