Expand disk or add new disk to big-ip VE

Steps to increase the disk can be found here

Here are some unofficial options:

The OVA only comes with 100GB so it's hard to maintain 3 different Volumes within that.

There are 3 options to resolve this:

1) Delete an existing volume (the one you're not upgrading from and not upgrading to) Go to System -> Disk Management -> Click on HD1. Under Contained Software Volumes and Contained Application Volumes, select the HD1.X that you want to delete and hit "Delete..." Once deleted and only two Volumes in use you should be able to upgrade from one to the other.

2) Remove the reserved space:

Go to System -> Disk Management -> Click on HD1 Under Mode, use Mixed and enter 0 under "Reserved" This will free up some space and that might just be enough to let you use 3 volumes.

3) Extend the disk space:

This is a non official procedure (which is working) which allows users to extend their VMware disk in order to be able to add more Volumes.

See here for the steps: http://pastebin.com/S2ZzyvtB

I'll add them to this post once the word per post limit on DC is increased.

Aaron

Mm... 3 only resizes the PV. That's not really what the user needs. And not really necessary.

Because the VE is a Linux host at heart (Running a separate process called TMM that is the actual BigIP micro-kernel), we get the advantage of all Linux systems. Namely LVM (Logical Volume Manager).

It's not a supported function to add disk space, but I've done it myself. The biggest issue is that you can't resize the FS on the fly. (Or couldn't in the version I was doing it on).

If you don't know Linux, and have a Linux admin handy, grab them for some moral support. Make sure your VM is backed up (A VMWare Snapshot should do it) and then start.

I'll keep this vague... High level instructions only...

1. Add a new PV (Physical Volume) to the VG (Volume Group).
2. With your increased size of VG you can extend the size of the LV (Logical Volume) that the FS sits on
3. Boot the VE into single user
4. run resizefs to increase the size of the FS to match the (Now larger) size of the LV
5. Boot back to multi-user

In theory you can resize on the fly. In practice that didn't work for me because the system wanted it offline for some reason (Sorry, can't remember why exactly at the moment. I'd need to run through it again, it's possible it just wanted to do an fsck first).

There's info on resizing an ext3 filesystem (Online) here if you want it (You do need to add extra space to the VG first though because on mine there's only 2GB free in the VG) -> http://backdrift.org/online-ext3-grow-resize-with-lvm

Thanks for you suggestions will try them out today and get back to you all about my results :-)

i tried the steps hoolio suggested in option 3 and for me it works like a charm. i couldn't provission APM in my third volume and after adding 100gb to the original disk now i can.

Theres a handy util that will resize the harddisc to a vdi on this link https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=22422