0

I'm running a virtual machine (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) on VMware ESXi. The virtual machines needed extra storage as to why i raised the disk size in ESXi, and ran pationing etc. from the virtual machine itself. All was fine (i thought) as both the df -h and df -i reported lots of diskspace and inodes left. But when i hit the partition's old limit i was faced by "no space left on device". As the case was very urgent i decided to reboot the machine which solved the problem and let new data be written to the partition.

My question: Is reboot of the virtual machine necessary or could it be avoided somehow?

Quick summary:

  • Raise disk size in ESXi
  • Repartition using parted
  • Grow filesystem (xfs)
  • Verify with df
SteffenNielsen
  • 467
  • 4
  • 15
  • Looks like you had to? I don't understand whether your observations already answered your question. I thought XFS can be expanded live therefore, suggesting theres's no need for reboot. – Recct Nov 04 '15 at 10:03
  • @Recct Thank you for replying. What i wanted to know, was if any command could help me avoid a reboot. The case could aswel be that i missed something along the way growing the filesystem/partition? – SteffenNielsen Nov 04 '15 at 10:10
  • 1
    When you resize a partition, [this](http://serverfault.com/q/36038/126632) often happens. – Michael Hampton Nov 04 '15 at 17:04

1 Answers1

2

You can use partprobe /dev/sdX or hdparm -z /dev/sdX

Anyway, in some circumstances these command are not sufficient, and a reboot is required.

In your case, the strange thing is that a filesystem resize was performed without problem (and confirmed by a df, right?) and so the partition table should have been reread correctly...

shodanshok
  • 44,038
  • 6
  • 98
  • 162
  • Thanks shodanshok. Yep, no error messages etc., all went fine resizing the partition. I'm not able to test this scenario, but after researching a bit on partprobe I seem to come up with the same conclusion as you. Thank you for clearing up this little mystery. – SteffenNielsen Nov 05 '15 at 08:06