Do I manually have to configure partitions to map to /dev/mapper when working with LVM?

I'm creating a brand, new RHEL 5 server (VM) from scratch and I'm configuring the various partitions to fit into LVM. This will be living on a SAN, and I have two other servers that will be coming down the pipe here soon as well, so I want to plan/prepare for them as well.

I'm looking at what the previous sys admin did and I see that /dev/mapper is coming into play.

While building the various physical, volume and logical volumes, do I have to do anything manually to point those to /dev/mapper? Or will that automatically map the varopis Volume Managers and Logical Volumes to it? The reason I ask is when I look at previous build servers, using the df -ha command I can see the various partitions that are pointing to /dev/mapper. Also can see this under /etc/fstab too.

On the brand new server, if I look at /dev/mapper, this is currently what I'm seeing:

[cmmiller@ameda4aisrx0111 mapper]$ ls -al
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 100 Apr 21 13:50 .
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4500 Apr 22 09:10 ..
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 253, 0 Apr 21 13:50 VolGroup00-LogVol00
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 253, 1 Apr 21 13:50 VolGroup00-LogVol01
crw------- 1 root root 10, 60 Apr 21 13:50 control
[cmmiller@ameda4aisrx0111 mapper]$

To me, it looks like VolGroup00, Logical Volume 00 and Logical Volume 01 automatically mapped to /dev/mapper. So far I don't see any partitions mapped to either of these along with nothing under /etc/fstab.

thanks