Extend Disk on a VirtualBox VDI

If you are running your RuBAN installation on a virtual machine you may at some stage need to extend the disk size. This tutorial shows you how to enlarge a disk on a VirtualBox machine hosted on Windows.

This tutorial is based on the assumption that you have a working virtual CentOS machine set up in VirtualBox hosted on a Windows machine.

Ensure that your VirtualBox machine is set to Powered Off, not saved.

In the Windows command prompt, navigate to the folder where VirtualBox is installed, so as to be able to access VirtualBox commands.

The relevant folder is typically C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox

While still in the VirtualBox folder, use the VirtualBox modifyhd command to resize the virtual disk file.

In this example the file CentOS-RuBAN.vdi is being resized to 81920 MB (80 GB):

VBoxManage modifyhd “C:\Users\Alex\VirtualBox VMs\CentOS-RuBAN\CentOS-RuBAN.vdi” --resize 81920

Boot your VirtualBox machine and log on.

If you didn't log on as root already you can use the sudo bash command to enable execution of all commands as root.

sudo bash

Check which partition was extended by running the fdisk -l command.

fdisk -l

We will now assume that the sda partition was extended. If that is the case we can now create a new primary partition on sda:

fdisk /dev/sda

Create a new partition with n, then p and tag it with t as type 0x8e. Write your changes with w and exit fdisk. See below image:

Reboot your virtual machine.

Create a new physical volume. We will now assume that the volume is sda3:

pvcreate /dev/sda3

Add the new partition to your volume group:

vgextend VolGroup /dev/sda3

Now expand your partition, here exemplified as a 80GB expansion:

lvextend -L +80G /dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root

Resize the partition:

 resize2fs /dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root

You have now finalised the process of enlarging the disk on your virtual machine.