wiki/gofurther/resize.md

title	description	published	date	tags	editor	dateCreated
Resize an existing virtual disk		true	2022-01-31T13:20:51.295Z		markdown	2021-11-13T11:41:29.087Z

Resize a disk

Instructions only applies to Linux guests. {.is-info}

Background

A virtual machine's disk may have to be resized, typically due to lack of space. This page explains how to do so.

The process involves creating a new blank virtual disk of the desired size and grow the former disk into the new one.

Usage

In-place expansion is not supported. A new disk of the desired size has to be created. {.is-info}

• Move to the location that contains the existing image

cd /var/lib/libvirt/images

• Create a new disk image

Use the following command to create a disk of 15 GB called phyllome-bigger.img.

qemu-img create -f raw phyllome-bigger.img 15G

• Expand the root partition

This command expects the root partition to be located on the vda3 partition. It has only been tested against the ext4filesystem.
{.is-warning}

virt-resize --expand /dev/vda3 phyllome.img phyllome-bigger.img

• The following should appear

[   0.0] Examining phyllome.img
**********

Summary of changes:

/dev/vda1: This partition will be left alone.

/dev/vda2: This partition will be left alone.

/dev/vda3: This partition will be resized from 5G to 15G.  The 
filesystem ext4 on /dev/vda3 will be expanded using the ‘resize2fs’ 
method.

**********
[   2.1] Setting up initial partition table on phyllome-bigger.img
[  12.9] Copying /dev/vda1
[  13.1] Copying /dev/vda2
[  13.4] Copying /dev/vda3
 100% ⟦▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒⟧ 00:00
[  38.3] Expanding /dev/vda3 using the ‘resize2fs’ method

Resize operation completed with no errors.  Before deleting the old disk, 
carefully check that the resized disk boots and works correctly.

• Switch to the new disk for your virtual machine

To-do

Resources

As per the software description : "qemu-img allows you to create, convert and modify images offline. It can handle all image formats supported by QEMU."

• Installation

On Fedora-related distributions, virt-resize is provided by the guestfs-tools package :

# dnf install guestfs-tools

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