Expanding a VM

[paulgarratt83]

To All

We run quite a few VM's for our Moodles here, each VM is 10gig. However the 14-19 diploma VM is now at 9gig and I need to make the VM bigger. I can change the size of the disk space on the VM but the OS doesn't reconise it has more space. It is running linux OS with Moodle.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to increase the disk space.


Thank you

[localzuk]

To All

We run quite a few VM's for our Moodles here, each VM is 10gig. However the 14-19 diploma VM is now at 9gig and I need to make the VM bigger. I can change the size of the disk space on the VM but the OS doesn't reconise it has more space. It is running linux OS with Moodle.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to increase the disk space.


Thank you

What OS are you running? The issue will be down to the partitioning. The OS will most likely know there is more space on the disk, but it won't be assigned to a partition. If you want to make an existing partition larger, that will require knowing what the partition type is (ext2? reiserfs? etc...).

[Duke]

I'm not going to recommend this because if it goes wrong it's painful (although at least doing a full VM backup should be easy), but GParted may well solve your problem. I had a similar problem on a physical server where Dell did a Red Hat install on a box that had several hundred GB of HDD space, but used a partitioning scheme that took up about 10GB, leaving me with a tiny /var (funnily enough it was a Moodle box too!) that rapidly filled up.

I booted GParted off a live CD, moved the partitions after the one I wanted to create some space, then expanded the partition into the available space. In theory it's pretty simple, although it can take a while to move the data around so plan for some downtime. As with anything that involves partitions and formatting back up your data first and check the backup is usable!

localzuk is right about partition types, but GParted should handle most Linux stuff. The GUI is (or was when I last used it ages ago) pretty friendly, just double check everything before you commit to any changes.

Hope this helps,
Chris

[apaton]

I agree with Duke, with "recommend" Gparted. I've used it a few times with VMware & Red Hat 4/5(ext3) and worked well, AGAIN I would also strongly recommend a backup before any changes.

Andy