Increasing storage size
Scalability is one of the key benefits of cloud services allowing you to grow your usage along with your company. Going up in General Purpose plans affords you not only more CPU cores and memory but also storage.
However, increasing storage size also requires increasing the partition on the operating system level. Luckily, increasing storage size is quick and easy thanks to automated filesystem resizing!
In this guide, we’ll show you how to easily increase the storage size of your Cloud Server.
However, if you just need more storage space for data files, we suggest adding new storage devices as once increased, the storage size cannot be reduced.
Increasing storage device size
If you’ve scaled up your Cloud Server by changing up to a higher tier General Purpose plan, you might want to also take advantage of the included additional storage space.
Increasing storage size is a two-phase operation:
1 - First, you will need to reserve the additional storage space by expanding your current storage device at your UpCloud Control Panel.
2 - Then, resize the filesystem to allow your Cloud Server to use the added storage space.
Note that decreasing storage size is not quite as straightforward. If you expect to need to scale down your Cloud Server in the future, you might not want to increase your storage size until necessary.
Start by increasing the storage size at the UpCloud Control Panel . You will need to shut down your Cloud Server before you can change the storage configuration.
When your server is powered down, open your server settings and go to the Storage tab.
At the Storage resources list, increase the storage device size by using the slider or by entering the desired value in the text field on the right.
After you’ve selected the new desired storage size, click the Save button and then choose whether to automatically resize the filesystem or to do it manually afterwards.
When saved to resize the filesystem and partition, the storage resizing is then performed automatically. Just sit back and wait for the process to complete before starting up your Cloud Server again.
Once the storage size has been successfully increased, the new capacity will show up in the device information. The capacity indicates the storage space allocated to the device.
Start up your Cloud Server again and confirm your storage device was increased successfully. When you are certain everything is in order, you can delete the automated backup made before applying changes to the storage devices.
Manually extending a partition on Linux
If you chose to resize storage without applying changes to the filesystem and partition automatically, you will then need to make the changes manually. Before doing so, we highly recommend taking a backup of your server before resizing storage.
When your Cloud Server is up and running again, log in using SSH.
Once in, check that your storage device has increased in size using the command below. Also, make note of your storage device and partition names.
lsblkNAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
vda 252:0 0 50G 0 disk
├─vda1 252:1 0 1007K 0 part
└─vda2 252:2 0 25G 0 part /Commonly you would be increasing the primary storage, which is usually called vda. Any secondary storage devices would have a different dev name such as vdb, or vdc. You will notice that only the storage device size is showing the whole capacity you set at your UpCloud Control Panel, like 50 GB in the example output above. Follow through with the rest of this section to get the partition extended to use the whole storage space.
Start by running the following command to open the partitioning tool.
sudo partedGNU Parted 3.3
Using /dev/vda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.Next, check the current partition details by using the print command as shown below.
(parted) printDepending on your operating system, Parted may notice the new unused space available on the storage device. Enter “fix” as in the example below to continue.
Warning: Not all of the space available to /dev/vda appears to be used, you can fix the GPT to use all of the space (an extra 10485760
blocks) or continue with the current setting?
Fix/Ignore? fixOnce the partition manager has done its thing, or if Parted didn’t prompt you about the unused space, you’ll get a printout similar to the output underneath. Make note of the size of the storage device you extended, the last partition number and the filesystem type.
Model: Virtio Block Device (virtblk)
Disk /dev/vda: 53.7GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 17.4kB 1049kB 1031kB BIOS boot partition bios_grub
2 1049kB 26.8GB 26.8GB ext4 Linux filesystemYou can now extend the filesystem partition with the resizepart command.
(parted) resizepartThen make the following selections according to your storage size and partition number.
Partition number? 2
Warning: Partition /dev/vda2 is being used. Are you sure you want to continue?
Yes/No? yes
End? [26.8GB]? 53.7GBIf you do not get any output or error, you were successful in extending the partition. Verify this by using the print command again.
(parted) printModel: Virtio Block Device (virtblk)
Disk /dev/vda: 53.7GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 17.4kB 1049kB 1031kB BIOS boot partition bios_grub
2 1049kB 53.7GB 53.7GB ext4 Linux filesystemWith the partition resized, you can quit the parted application.
(parted) quitNow that you have extended the partition to use the new storage space you are almost done. However, the filesystem still doesn’t know about it. You can check this by running the following command.
df -hFilesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 471M 0 471M 0% /dev
tmpfs 98M 652K 98M 1% /run
/dev/vda2 25G 2.1G 22G 9% /
tmpfs 490M 0 490M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 490M 0 490M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 98M 0 98M 0% /run/user/0Continue with the steps in the next section to fix this.
Updating the filesystem on Linux
Once your server is up and running again, finish the operation by updating the filesystem.
If your Cloud Server is using the EXT4 filesystem, you can do this with the resize2fs command-line tool. Notice that the {partition} means the part on the disk you are expanding. Check the output of the lsblk command if you are unsure. For example, if your storage device is called vda, then your partition is probably named vda1 or vda2.
sudo resize2fs /dev/{partition}resize2fs 1.45.5 (07-Jan-2020)
Filesystem at /dev/vda2 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old_desc_blocks = 4, new_desc_blocks = 7
The filesystem on /dev/vda2 is now 13106939 (4k) blocks long.Alternatively, distributions like CentOS and other RHEL derivatives might use the XFS filesystem instead of EXT4. On these servers, you will need to use the xfs_growfs tool to expand the partition. Install the utility if it cannot already be found.
sudo dnf install xfsprogsThen use the command underneath to resize your partition. Make sure to include the “/” in the command as it indicates the root directory required for the operation.
sudo xfs_growfs /meta-data=/dev/vda2 isize=512 agcount=35, agsize=191935 blks
= sectsz=512 attr=2, projid32bit=1
= crc=1 finobt=1, sparse=1, rmapbt=0
= reflink=1
data = bsize=4096 blocks=6553339, imaxpct=25
= sunit=0 swidth=0 blks
naming =version 2 bsize=4096 ascii-ci=0, ftype=1
log =internal log bsize=4096 blocks=2560, version=2
= sectsz=512 sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none extsz=4096 blocks=0, rtextents=0
data blocks changed from 6553339 to 13106939You are then done! Your filesystem should now be using all of the space allocated to the Cloud Server. You can verify this by checking the partition size with the command below.
df -hFilesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 471M 0 471M 0% /dev
tmpfs 98M 660K 98M 1% /run
/dev/vda2 50G 2.1G 46G 5% /
tmpfs 490M 0 490M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 490M 0 490M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 98M 0 98M 0% /run/user/0The example here demonstrates the process to extend a single 25GB storage to 50 GB. These steps are necessary when upgrading your cloud server to a higher-tier General Purpose plan, which comes with additional storage space. However, note that the process to decrease storage size is not this easy. If you are upgrading your Cloud Server only temporarily, you may wish to keep the storage size as is to be able to quickly downscale the server later on.
Manually extending a partition on Windows
Windows servers include management tools that can help you with resizing disks at the OS level. Log into your server for example with the Remote Desktop connection.
Start by opening the Disk Management panel. Right-clicking the Windows start icon and selecting it from the list, or typing diskmgmt.msc in the search or run and then pressing enter.
The management application will indicate the unallocated space available on your disk with a black colour bar above the segment. Right-click the primary partition you wish to resize and select Extend volume.
In the wizard, the default values will extend the partition to use up all of the unallocated storage. Simply click Next on the first and second windows unless you wish to only extend a certain amount. On the last screen check that the values are correct and click Finish to confirm the changes.
Once the requested operation is complete, the Disk Management panel will update to show the partition you extended now occupying the space previously unallocated. You are then done and can close the Disk Management window. The added storage space is ready to use with no additional restarts required.