If you are like me and create virtual machines with only a reasonable virtual disk size to start with (because you can always expand them in the future, right?), it is very much possible you encountering a situation where you want to increase the virtual disk size. And if you run Fedora like me, it is also possible you suddenly finding yourself looking for a way to expand a LVM partition to utilize the gained space once the VDI size is increased. Well, today, I ran into both. Here is how I went about them.
Resizing the VDI
A virtual disk image is easily resizable1. First, I fired up a cmd window and ran the following (i.e. we want to expand Fedora31.vdi to 100GB).
VBoxManage modifyhd Fedora31.vdi --resize 100000
When the output is like:
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
…we can be assured that the task is done.
Expanding the Physical Partition
I created a new VM2 in VBox. Then attached the virtual disk (i.e. Fedora31.vdi) and inserted a GParted ISO to optical drive before starting the VM. GParted booted up3. Here, I simply expanded the partition I needed to claim new space since no partitions were sitting between it and unallocated space. However, I only expanded it up to 25GB, leaving out the rest of gained 100GB unallocated on purpose.
Expanding the LVM Partition
Once I booted my Fedora VM, I found out though the disk space had increased, the LVM partition (i.e. fedora_localhost–live-root) had not expanded.
# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 97.7G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1G 0 part /boot
└─sda2 8:2 0 24.8G 0 part
├─fedora_localhost--live-root 253:0 0 12.5G 0 lvm /
└─fedora_localhost--live-swap 253:1 0 1.5G 0 lvm [SWAP]
sr0 11:0 1 73.6M 0 rom
# fdisk -l /dev/sda2
Disk /dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-root: 12.51 GiB, 13417578496 bytes, 26206208 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytesFortunately enough, without much trouble, a couple web searches later I found out what4 I was looking for.
Afterwards, I ran following in order to expand the LVM partition (i.e. fedora_localhost–live-root) to take up maximum space available for it inside the physical partition.
# lvextend -r -l +100%FREE /dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-root
Which gave following as the output.
Size of logical volume fedora_localhost-live/root changed from <12.50 GiB (3199 extents) to <23.24 GiB (5949 extents).
Logical volume fedora_localhost-live/root successfully resized.
resize2fs 1.45.3 (14-Jul-2019)
Filesystem at /dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-root is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old_desc_blocks = 2, new_desc_blocks = 3
The filesystem on /dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-root is now 6091776 (4k) blocks long.
Now, that the task is already done, the final state of things is as follows.
# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 97.7G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1G 0 part /boot
└─sda2 8:2 0 24.8G 0 part
├─fedora_localhost--live-root 253:0 0 23.2G 0 lvm /
└─fedora_localhost--live-swap 253:1 0 1.5G 0 lvm [SWAP]
sr0 11:0 1 73.6M 0 rom
# fdisk -l /dev/sda2
Disk /dev/sda2: 24.76 GiB, 26565672960 bytes, 51886080 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytesExpandable only, cannot shrink using VirtualBox VBoxManage utility as of version 6.0.16r135674. Shout out to Derek Molly . ↩︎
In the creation wizard, Type: Linux, Version: Linux. ↩︎
If it does not for you, change boot device order in VM settings under System. Also note there are other ways to accomplish the same. ↩︎
https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/how-to-add-unallocated-disk-space-to-lvm-home/3746 ↩︎