Increasing Available Storage

You may find it necessary to increase the total available storage on your ExaVault appliance.

This is a multi-step process. First, you will increase the size of the data disk in your VM's hypervisor. Then, you will log in to your appliance via SSH to expand the size of your virtual disk, and finally you will increase your site's storage quota in the Django Administration panel.

This article will provide you with the steps for performing this process safely.

Physically adding storage to your VM environment

First, make additional storage space available to your appliance using your VM environment.

This may be done by physically adding disks or provisioning existing storage so that it is available to your ExaVault virtual machine.

The exact instructions for this step will vary from environment to environment depending on server type, OS, and virtual machine environment.

Increasing the size of your data disk

Once you have made additional storage space available, log in to your Virtual Machine Hypervisor with administrator rights and increase the size of your ExaVault VM's data disk.

Refer to your hypervisor's documentation for steps on how to do this correctly.

Expanding the VM's virtual disk

This step must be performed on your ExaVault VM's command line. Connect to the appliance via SSH.

Switch to the superuser account with the command sudo su -.

Check the filesystem type of your /dev/sdb1 partition with the command df -Th. The filesystem type should be xfs. If /dev/sdb1 shows any other type, please contact Support for next steps.

Run the four following commands to unset existing partition information and grow the /dev/sdb1 partition to use the newly added space:

ls /sys/class/scsi_device/*/device/rescan | while read path; do echo 1 > $path; done
ls /sys/class/scsi_host/host*/scan | while read path; do echo "- - -" > $path; done
growpart /dev/sdb 1
xfs_growfs -d /dev/sdb1

Increase ExaVault disk quota

Log in to the ExaVault web application with your site administrator user. Click your user avatar in the top right corner of the page, then click on Administration from the drop-down menu to go to Django admin.

Click on sites, then click on the name of your site. Scroll down to the quota section and look for Storage.

Increase the storage limit to 95% of the new, increased volume size. Leaving 5% of the storage limit for system files ensures that the volume will not fill up and halt the system.

Click Save to save these changes.

Your total available storage space will now be increased and ready to use.