Sujith's Blog

How to increase the storage of a Virtual Machine by resizing Logical Volume

23 May 2016

Increasing the partition/storage of a linux Virtual-Machine instance is done in three steps.

Resize the Virtual Disk

Power off the virtual machine and then, increase the virtual disk/storage size from the virtual machine settings. By increasing storage space here, the OS is not going to use/detect this. For that we have resize the partition using Disk partition manager (Gparted here).

Get Gparted and resize the partition.

For gparted, we can either use Gparted.iso or any of ubuntu live CD. I’m using a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu live CD iso.

For choosing/changing the boot order/device for virtual instance, We have to increase the boot delay in Options -> Boot options -> Power on Boot Delay. This will allow us to see the boot screen for the specified no. of milliseconds.

In Gparetd first resize the extended partition, then resize the LVM.

Resize the LVM Volume.

For resizing the LVM, first resize the Physical Volume.

$ sudo pvs

PV         VG              Fmt  Attr PSize   PFree
  /dev/sda5  ubuntuServer-vg lvm2 a--  99.76g 9.16g

$ sudo pvresize /dev/sda5

Physical volume "/dev/sda5" changed
  1 physical volume(s) resized / 0 physical volume(s) not resized

Next extend the Logical volume to the full size of PV(Physical Volume).

$ sudo lvdisplay

  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Path                /dev/PA-server-vg/root
  LV Name                root
  VG Name                PA-server-vg
  LV UUID                fwuhJl-mvBY-xDgv-ihmF-CCDH-U2kX-EZ7tMV
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Creation host, time PA-server, 2014-10-17 19:31:06 +0530
  LV Status              available
  # open                 1
  LV Size                31.76 GiB
  Current LE             8130
  Segments               2
  Allocation             inherit
  Read ahead sectors     auto
  - currently set to     256
  Block device           252:0

  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Path                /dev/PA-server-vg/swap_1
  LV Name                swap_1
  VG Name                PA-server-vg
  LV UUID                Xqk8xg-mVYW-zgpc-FYPz-MSpd-0bIr-Kqgnxq
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Creation host, time PA-server, 2014-10-17 19:31:06 +0530
  LV Status              available
  # open                 0
  LV Size                8.00 GiB
  Current LE             2048
  Segments               1
  Allocation             inherit
  Read ahead sectors     auto
  - currently set to     256
  Block device           252:1

Take the LV Path of the volume to be extended(root, here /dev/PA-server-vg/root ), now we can resize it to the available 100% using lvextend.

$ lvextend -l+100%FREE /dev/PA-server-vg/root

Now the last step is to extend the file-system on the volume.

$ resize2fs /dev/PA-server-vg/root

Now check the with df -h, we have resized the disk/storage of the VM.

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