Growing disks for virtual machines have become pretty trivial with tools like livecd”s and gparted. Recently I had to grow my Solaris 11 disk from 16GB to 20GB. And of course on Solaris it”s a ZFS volume.
I don”t think gparted can re-size the Solaris2 partitions used by Solaris 11 so I did the re-size on a running system using format. There might be a better way and I advise you NOT to do this on a critical system. Nonetheless it worked for me on a Virtualbox as well as a KVM virtual machine.
Re-sizing the disk on the host side is out of scope and you can use a myriad of ways to accomplish that for instance lvextend when using LVM. In this case I documented the re-sizing as was performed with Virtualbox.
Also note this only worked on Solaris x86. On Sparc there is no expand option for the partition in the format tool. There is a way to resize a system disk but it is pretty painful. Search my blog for Growing Solaris LDOM rpool.
Re-size Disk:
Logical size: 16384 MBytes Current size on disk: 9818 MBytes
$ vboxmanage modifyhd Solaris11.vdi --resize 20000 0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
$ vboxmanage showhdinfo Solaris11.vdi Logical size: 20000 MBytes Current size on disk: 9819 MBytesInformation before disk resize:
SunOS solaris 5.11 11.1 i86pc i386 i86pc
root@solaris:~# zpool status rpool pool: rpool NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM rpool ONLINE 0 0 0c3t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
root@solaris:~# df -h | grep rpool rpool/ROOT/solaris-2 16G 3.8G 7.0G 36% /
root@solaris:~# format AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS: 0. c3t0d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 2085 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@0,0 Specify disk (enter its number): 0 selecting c3t0d0 [disk formatted] /dev/dsk/c3t0d0s0 is part of active ZFS pool rpool. Please see zpool(1M).
...partition> pr Current partition table (original): Total disk cylinders available: 2085 + 2 (reserved cylinders)
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks 0 root wm 1 - 2084 15.96GB (2084/0/0) 33479460 1 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0 2 backup wu 0 - 2086 15.99GB (2087/0/0) 33527655 8 boot wu 0 - 0 7.84MB (1/0/0) 16065
...
Total disk size is 2088 cylinders Cylinder size is 16065 (512 byte) blocks
Cylinders Partition Status Type Start End Length % ========= ====== ============ ===== === ====== === 1 Active Solaris2 1 2087 2087 100Physical disk information after resize at host level:
...Total disk size is 2549 cylinders Cylinder size is 16065 (512 byte) blocks
Cylinders Partition Status Type Start End Length % ========= ====== ============ ===== === ====== === 1 Active Solaris2 1 2087 2087 82Tell the OS about the new size using expand:
...partition> expand Expansion of label cannot be undone; continue (y/n) ? y The expanded capacity was added to the disk label. Disk label was written to disk.
partition> pr Current partition table (original): Total disk cylinders available: 2546 + 2 (reserved cylinders)
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks 0 root wm 1 - 2084 15.96GB (2084/0/0) 33479460 2 backup wu 0 - 2086 15.99GB (2087/0/0) 33527655 8 boot wu 0 - 0 7.84MB (1/0/0) 16065Make the changes to the physical partition. I removed the “backup” slice as well since I don”t need it.
...partition> pr Current partition table (unnamed): Total disk cylinders available: 2546 + 2 (reserved cylinders)
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks 0 root wm 1 - 2545 19.50GB (2545/0/0) 40885425 8 boot wu 0 - 0 7.84MB (1/0/0) 16065
partition> label Ready to label disk, continue? yFinally scrub and grow ZFS:
root@solaris:~# zpool status rpool pool: rpool state: ONLINE scan: scrub in progress since Fri Dec 7 14:21:25 2012 11.8M scanned out of 8.57G at 670K/s, 3h43m to go 0 repaired, 0.13% done config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM rpool ONLINE 0 0 0 c3t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
root@solaris:~# zpool set autoexpand=on rpool
root@solaris:~# zpool get all rpool | grep size rpool size 19.4G
root@solaris:~# df -h | grep ROOT rpool/ROOT/solaris-2 19G 3.8G 10G 27% / rpool/ROOT/solaris-2/var 19G 955M 10G 9% /var
root@solaris:~# zpool set autoexpand=off rpool