Increasing hard disk size with LVM on VMWare Fusion Linux guest
I currently use VMware Fusion to maintain and run a Linux guest on my Macbook. When I originally installed the guest, I assumed that a 20 GB virtual disk would be more than enough space for my Linux hacking.
As you can probably infer from the title of this post, some recent developments invalidated that assumption and necessitated more disk space. What follows is a procedure I cobbled together from a bunch of disparate sources that works for my particular setup (VMware Fusion 2.0.4, Fedora 10 guest w/LVM and an ext3 filesystem). These instructions involve modifying physical partitions, logical volumes, and your filesystem so I advise you to read through them to the end before getting started.
The very first step is to use Fusion to increase the “physical size” of the virtual disk. This functionality is accessible through the Virtual Machine -> Hard Disk -> Hard Disk Settings menu item. The resulting dialog contains a Disk size slider. Note that this slider is not accessible unless the VM in question is shut down and (more annoyingly) all pre-existing snapshots are deleted. I just had one snapshot to delete, but it took a while, so be patient. After you’ve increased the disk size, probably wouldn’t hurt to take a new snapshot, just in case something goes wrong with the procedure below.
Now that we’ve increased the disk size (I increased mine from 20GB -> 50GB), let’s boot the VM and log into our guest. We’ll use the df command to examine our mounted file filesystems:
[root@fedora ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
18G 15G 1.9G 89% /
/dev/sda1 190M 163M 18M 91% /boot
tmpfs 502M 80K 502M 1% /dev/shm
Still shows 20 GB of total space and a filesystem device /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 that’s indicative of LVM, the default for Fedora. Use the venerable fdisk to examine the “physical” disk:
[root@fedora ~]# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 52.6 GB, 52613349376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 6396 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000f2b12
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 25 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 26 2610 20764012+ 8e Linux LVM
The physical disk has the capacity, but its in the form of unpartitioned/unformatted space. Before we can do anything, We need to create a new partition containing this space. First we’ll drop into parted and examine the existing partition table:
(parted) print
Model: VMware, VMware Virtual S (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 52.6GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 206MB 206MB primary ext3 boot
2 206MB 21.5GB 21.3GB primary lvm
Create a new partition that uses up all of the new space on the physical device:
(parted) mkpart primary 21.4GB -1s
(parted) print
Model: VMware, VMware Virtual S (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 52.6GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 206MB 206MB primary ext3 boot
2 206MB 21.5GB 21.3GB primary lvm
3 21.5GB 52.6GB 31.1GB primary
Use partprobe to load the table:
(parted) quit
[root@fedora ~]# partprobe
At this point we’ve got a new partition, /dev/sda3, that you could simply format with mke2fs and mount as its own filesystem e.g. /mnt/data. I personally chose to leverage LVM’s capabilities and incorporate the new partition into the existing logical volume mounted as /. Start by examining the set of existing physical volumes:
[root@fedora ~]# lvm pvs
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sda2 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 19.78G 32.00M
Create a new physical volume with the new partition:
[root@fedora ~]# lvm pvcreate /dev/sda3
Physical volume "/dev/sda3" successfully created
[root@fedora ~]# lvm pvs
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sda2 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 19.78G 32.00M
/dev/sda3 lvm2 -- 29.01G 29.01G
Add new physical volume to the volume group. If you recall from the initial df output above, the volume group in question is VolGroup0:
[root@fedora ~]# lvm vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/sda3
Volume group "VolGroup00" successfully extended
[root@fedora ~]# lvm pvs
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sda2 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 19.78G 32.00M
/dev/sda3 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 29.00G 29.00G
Now extend the logical volume to include the physical volume we just added to the group. Use lvm vgdisplay to examine the group:
[root@fedora ~]# lvm vgdisplay VolGroup00
--- Volume group ---
VG Name VolGroup00
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 2
Metadata Sequence No 4
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 2
Open LV 2
Max PV 0
Cur PV 2
Act PV 2
VG Size 48.78 GB
PE Size 32.00 MB
Total PE 1561
Alloc PE / Size 632 / 19.75 GB
Free PE / Size 929 / 29.03 GB
VG UUID 8w2Wi9-T2lV-IKCV-fLRP-yTJl-teJM-LuGoNb
The Free PE/Size field shows the new physical volume as 929 free extents. Extend the logical volume to include all free extents:
[root@fedora ~]# lvm lvextend -l+929 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
Extending logical volume LogVol00 to 46.81 GB
Logical volume LogVol00 successfully resized
Use resize2fs to extend our ext3 filesystem online. Note that many LVM tutorials online refer to the now deprecated ext2online command for this step, resize2fs now provides this functionality:
root@fedora ~]# resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
resize2fs 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
Filesystem at /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old desc_blocks = 2, new_desc_blocks = 3
Performing an on-line resize of /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 to 12271616 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 is now 12271616 blocks long.
Finally, use df again to verify that we have lots of free space:
[root@fedora ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
47G 15G 29G 34% /
/dev/sda1 190M 163M 18M 91% /boot
tmpfs 502M 80K 502M 1% /dev/shm