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Extending VMDK Size

Supportlamp 12

I am trying to get an application to work on the LAMP 12 appliance, and I'm running out of space because I need to load a particularly huge (13gb) database. I'm getting some errors about running out of space, and it finally clicked that the .vmdk I'm using is set to 20gb and I'm trying to use 26gb of space (.sql backup and then resultant database files).

I'm completely lost as to how to increase the size of the VM. We used the .vmdk as opposed to the .iso because we need to be able to push this local VM to the Turnkey Hub at some point... and I experienced problems doing this with the .iso version which allows me to decide the size of the disk image.

Can anybody point me to some guides about increasing the disk size of a VM?

Replies (4)

By default TKL uses LVM

Reply 2

Have a look at this blog post by Liraz (TKL core dev) on using that to extend your diskspace. It's written for v11.x but should still apply to v12.0

Do you have a lot of data?

Reply 3

I suspect that your issue is because of disk size vs amount of data. TKLBAM requires a fair bit of free space to do a backup (in comparision to the size of the backup).

I don't for a fact know that this is how TKLBAM works, but my understanding (including some assumptions) is it first copies all the relevant data to a local cache (on the disk) and then creates a compressed archive of it prior to uploading. This means that you'll need at least twice as much free space as data being backed up. And that's only for the first backup.

My understanding is that for subsequent backups it recaches the data (again) and then compares it to the most recent cache and creates an archive of the diff between the 2 data sets (ie an incremental backup), it then creates an archive of those changed files prior to upload. So for the second (and subsequent) backup(s) you'll need at least 3+ times the space as files being backed up.

If I'm right, then if space becomes low and either copying or archive creation fails, the TKLBAM will fail.

Does that sound likely?

Thanks for the links guys!I

Reply 4

Thanks for the links guys!

While I was waiting for replies, I tried creating a VM from the LAMP 12 appliance .iso instead of the .vmdk. I was doing this because previously, I could only push a local VM to the TKL Hub when I set the local vm up this way.

I actually have something pretty cool to report. With LAMP 12, backing up an .iso created VM worked with no problem! So I'm glad to have some resources for increasing VMDK size, but I don't necessarily have to do that because the root thing I was trying to accomplish doesn't require a workaround anymore!

For the record, tklbam-backup was failing while it chunked up the backup into pieces using a .iso... something about a problem using a dynamically sized virtual disk vs a fixed size disk. I don't know if it's just Debian playing nicer with the tklbam-backup process than Ubuntu did... but either way it works and it kicks ass!

I was wrong about this, I was able to do one backup, and now subsequent backups fail. Arrrggggghhh...