Upgrading boot drive.

[Toby Cowles]

BACKGROUND:
I did a really stupid thing when I set up my proxmox server. I installed proxmox on a 128gb SSD, and passed all the other hard drives in the system through to a VM to server as my NAS. This ended about as well as you would expect. As I have contuined to add more VMs I know have a woping 10gb free on that boot drive for VM creation and about 15 for backups, isos, and templates. This is quite an issue as I have no backups of any of my VMs (which now that I have some more complex VMs would be very nice to have) and I can't create a new Ubuntu container that I would like to try to use to replace my Ubuntu VM that I have been using as a print server.

MAIN POINT:
So now I have a question for all you guys. Would it be OK if I just dd my boot drive on to a 256gb or 512gb SSD and then expand the main partation with Gparted or would this cause issues with proxmox's rather complex storage management (where part of the drive can only be used for iso, templates and backups, and part of the drive for VMs and containers)

Thanks so much for the help!

 

[LnxBil]

dding to a bigger disk is no problem, if you used bios boot. For uefi, this is a little bit harder, but can also be done.

What type of storage did you use on your SSD?

 

[Toby Cowles]

I think it is bios boot as it is all installed in an old HP z400 circa 2009/2010. The SSD is being used for both directory storage and lvm storage as it is the only drive Proxmox has access to.

 

[LnxBil]

Then dding to the new drive should not be a problem, it should boot right after that.

I'd try that on another machine before testing on production. Resizing the disks is roughly the same as it would be for a VM, so this should also apply:

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Resize_disks#2._Enlarge_the_partition.28s.29_in_the_virtual_disk

 

[Toby Cowles]

I resized the partition in gparted on the machine I cloned it on but that didn't resize the LVM-thin storage itself but there was some other post about how to do that which including a link to the wiki with instruction to prepare the meta-directory and then some commands to resize the LVM-thin itself. Basically, it all seems to have gone well, even if it wasn't as straight forward as I had hoped, and the server is back up and running with a brand new 256gb SSD. (This was the post that helped a lot btw https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/resize-lvm-thin-pool.48792)

 

[LnxBil]

Yes, you normally have to resize every layer involved:

* VM disk
* partition
* physical volume
* logical volume