A colleague asked me the other day how to increase a Linux filesystem on an Esxi guest. This procedure (I hope to post a solution in addition to the others on the web) is in no way simple. And it should be.<\/p>\n
The reason that it is not simple is that Linux, and operating systems in general, are carrying so much baggage related to physical infrastructure. LVM, which is standard on Linux to manage disks comes from a lineage of managing large numbers of physical disks. It was not designed to cope with a situation where a machine has one disk and that disk can suddenly increase in size from 20G to 30G. This is a common scenario in a virtual world.<\/p>\n
Even disk partitioning itself can be called into question. Take fdisk, which stands for “fixed disk”. Wikipedia informs us that this was introduced by IBM in 1983! Partitioning came along mainly in response to increasing disk sizes and the need to make one physical disk appear as multiple logical disks for convenience.<\/p>\n
All this technology was designed to cope with changes in physical capabilities and because we take it for granted it is still baked in to our virtualisation stack. To increase a filesystem on a Linux VM after changing the disk size you need to delete the partition, re-create it (with fdisk); use lvm commands (pvresize, lvextend) to make use of the extra *physical* extents and then grow the filesystem. Jeez.<\/p>\n
Now, where did I put my cloud operating system?<\/p>\n
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A colleague asked me the other day how to increase a Linux filesystem on an Esxi guest. This procedure (I hope to post a solution in addition to the others on the web) is in no way simple. And it … Continue reading