One common scenario that I face in my daily work is to add disk to various filesystems. Setting up systems correctly so that this is possible will save time and frustration. One of the easiest cases is adding disk to a virtual machine when the guest is using LVM and ext3.
As always, please be sure to backup your data before trying any filesystem or disk manipulation.
After adding the virtual hard disk using the VI client, provision the space from within the virtual machine using the following steps:
1. re-scan storage
echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan
2. Create physical volume from new device (Note: check with your SAN admin to see if you need to create a partition and align appropriately.)
pvcreate /dev/sdb
3. Extend the volume group to the new PV (physical volume):
vgextend vg01 /dev/sdb
3. Extend the LV (logical volume) to the desired size:
lvextend -L +2G /dev/vg01/lvol05
4. Resize the filesystem to cover the newly extended LV:
resize2fs /dev/vg01/lvol05
Your newly resized filesystem should now be available.
I have not yet tried expanding existing VMDK files on the fly with vSphere but I plan to test that out next.
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