Disk Management

When a disk on a virtual guest starts to fill up, we have two options:

• Allocate a new disk: if the disk in question is a data disk serving member data on a web server or a mail server, we generally want to allocate a new disk so our data disks don’t grow too large, making them more difficult to backup or to run disk utilities on. The web and mail servers use symlinks from the /home directory, allowing us to mount as many separate disks in the /media directory as needed.
• Extend the disk: other times it makes more sense to simply extend the disk that is filling up to relieve the pressure.

Either way, the approach is similar:

• In our seed inventory repository, edit the virtual guest in need of more disk space. Either add a new disk definition or increase the size of the existing one. When adding a new one, the name of the data disk should be in the format dataNNNN and be unique across all servers (when running the sower playbook command, the inventory will be validated to ensure no duplicate data disks are defined). When specifying units, always use either “g” or “t”.
• Use sower playbook to push the playbook to the virtual server’s host server. You can speed things up by passing the lvm-file tag with --tags lvm-file. Ansible will update the server’s configuration file tracking all logical volumes and it will automatically call the mf-manage-logical-volumes command that will adjust all logical volumes for you.
• Restart the guest. For changes to be seen on the guest, you must restart the guest.