Expanding volume size

You can expand the size of a volume.

Before you begin

You must be assigned one of the following permissions to expand volume size:
  • System level, Cloud group administration role with permission to View all cloud resources (Read-only permission)
  • Resource level administration role with Write or All access rights permission (ACL) for a specific instance

About this task

You can use the console, the command line interface, or the REST API to complete this task. For the command line and REST API information, see the Related information section.
Note:
  • You can resize (expand) internal VMFS, Block, or Block Shared volumes.
Important: You must not use the Expand operation that is provided on the Cloud > Volumes page to expand the size of the volumes that are attached to an IBM Spectrum Scale pattern. For details on how to expand the size of IBM Spectrum Scale file systems, see Expanding the IBM Spectrum Scale file system size.

Procedure

  1. Access the console pane. Click Cloud > Volumes.
  2. Locate the volume that you want to expand.
  3. Expand the size of the volume.
    You can click the name of the volume to display the details, and then click Expand in the toolbar, or you can click the Expand icon in the Actions column for the selected volume. Specify a size in GB that is greater than the previous size.
  4. When prompted to confirm that you want to expand the volume, click Expand to proceed or Cancel to cancel the request.
    If you proceed, the volume is expanded to the new size.
  5. Refresh the Volumes pane to verify volume expansion.
    Inform virtual machine users that the volume size has been increased and standard operating system utilities (such as, parted, fdisk or LVM tools) can use the expanded storage.

What to do next

If you expand a block storage volume that is attached to a virtual machine by using the Default attach block disk add-on that is greater than or equal to 2 TB that was previously formatted to Logical Volume Manager (LVM), you must complete additional steps before you can add it to a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux® 7.x or 8.x deployment by using an add-on. For more information, see Expanding volume size for LVM volumes.
Note: If VMFS volume expansion fails from the Cloud > Volumes page, attempt to get VMFS expansion done from storage devices. Do these steps:
  1. Click Hardware > Storage Devices > Search.
  2. Select the storage node on which the datastore resides. Click Expand Datastores and select the datastore.
  3. Click the Actions icon to increase the size of the datastore.
  4. Specify the size to expand in Gigabytes.
If the VMFS volume expansion fails even after multiple tries, contact IBM Support.