Extend virtual disk size of a VDI image

BACK UP EVERYTHING BEFORE TRYING THIS.

The entire process can be split into 4 stages.

1. Physically increasing the vdi file size on the host machine.

This requires help from the hypervisor OEM. For VDI, which is a native VirtualBox image, we'll use VBoxManage.

VBoxmanage modifyhd centos.vdi --resize 100000

If the above command doesn't work and throw an error about this feature not being implemented, you might try the following instead.

• Create a new disk with higher capacity
• VBoxManage clonemedium --existing

2. Resize the LVM.

For this we'll use GParted to resize the image. Boot up a GParted live CD and resize the required LVM partition to suit your need.

3. Resize the LVM-2

Boot up the machine with the newly extended image and check df -h and fdisk -l. You'll see that the disk has indeed grown, but LVM hasn't. Use the following command to resize LVM to full size.

• pvresize /dev/sda2 (assuming your LVM partition is sda2. Replace as required.)
• lvextend /dev/mapper/root -l+100%FREE (or, whatever your root logical volume is called.)

4. Extend the disk file system using appropriate tool.

For example, for XFS use the following commands,

• xfs_info /dev/mapper/centos-root
• xfs_growfs /dev/mapper/centos-root

This should make df as well as fdisk reflect the changes in disk space.

BACK UP EVERYTHING BEFORE TRYING THIS.