Over the past 5 years, I have been setting up Ubuntu servers using the Alternate installer. I need to provision a new server today, and I'm curious if the Alternate CD is still the only way to setup LVM/RAID at installation time. I'm my limited experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I noticed it's single installer configures LVM automatically. Has Ubuntu's installer, at least the standard "Server" installer, added support for LVM/RAID, or is the Alternate installer still required for that kind of server setup?

http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/DVDs/ubuntu/12.04.1/release/

Alternate install CD

The alternate install CD allows you to perform certain specialist installations of Ubuntu. It provides for the following situations:

• setting up automated deployments;
• upgrading from older installations without network access;
• LVM and/or RAID partitioning;
• installs on systems with less than about 384MiB of RAM (although note that low-memory systems may not be able to run a full desktop environment reasonably).

LVM has always been fundamental for our server needs, so I'm surprised if it is still not considered a server-worthy feature.