How to add additional disk space on Esxi VM series ?

[neilwu]

Hi,

The VM-Series Deployment Guide says we can add additional disk space of 40GB to 2TB for logging

purposes.

Does anyone know how to do that in production?

Thanks.

[reaper]

You'll need to add an additional disk of 2TB (or less) to the VM and then reboot the appliance, the reboot process will mount the second disk as a logging partition

[neilwu]

Hi, 

Thank you!

I tried to add an additional disk of 16G to the VM and then reboot this appliance.

But I can not log-in the appliance and the console shows "Cache data unavailable" after reboot.

Few minutes later, It's can be log-in and working. But I can not see the new disk or new partition by "show system disk-space" or "show system logdb-quota".

My VM-100 already upgraded to version 7.0.4.

[singh]

Hi Neil,

Do you see the additional disk space now in Web GUI ?

Device > Setup > Management > Logging and Reporting Settigs. 

[reaper]

You may want to open a support case to have that looked at, it should work simply by adding a fresh disk and rebooting the appliance

T

[Brandon_Wertz]

You can only have one virtual disk...You can't continually add a second, third, or fourth...etc if you find yourself running out of diskspace.  

I originally made that mistake and had a 500GB partition.  I added an extra 1.5TB and while the OS saw the space it couldn't allocate to it.  I had to delete the original 500GB partition and just allocate the 2TB.

There's a "Note" in the "Virtual disk" section that describes this limitation, but I missed it (of course initially).

"By default, the Panorama virtual appliance is set up with a single disk partition for all data, and ~10GB of this
space is allocated for log storage.

...

The Panorama virtual appliance by default installs with a virtual disk of size 34GB of which 10.89GB is used
for logging. To enable more than the ~10GB of storage, use the following procedure to create a new virtual disk
that can support between 40GB to 2TB of storage capacity.

...

The Panorama virtual appliance can only use one virtual disk."

[reaper]

@Brandon_Wertz: you can actually have 2. you start off with the initial disk the panorama is installed to that comes with a 10GB log partition, afterwards you can add a second disk up to 2tb which will be mounted as the log partition after the panorama is booted up again, the procedure to mount this new drive is described here on page 27: Panorama Administrator's Guide 6.1 (English)

[Brandon_Wertz]

@reaper I thought I included that part in my post, maybe I didn't (where I quoted it?)  A 10GB partition might as well be conisdered nothing.

[reaper]

10GB is indeed very small, if you make your initial disk larger the surplus will be added to the log partition, but if you decide to increase the log partition later that partition will be lost

you can add a second disk, it will mount as sdb1:

admin@Panorama> show system disk-space 

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3             3.8G  1.6G  2.1G  44% /
/dev/sda5             7.6G  1.5G  5.8G  20% /opt/pancfg
/dev/sda6             3.8G  1.9G  1.7G  54% /opt/panrepo
tmpfs                1005M     0 1005M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1              16G  195M   15G   2% /opt/panlogs

if you look at the partitions, the previos sda8 partition will have unmounted in favor of the newly added sdb

admin@Panorama> show system disk-partition 


Disk /dev/sda: 36.5 GB, 36507222016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4438 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1         250     2008093+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2             251         749     4008217+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3             750        1248     4008217+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4            1249        4438    25623675    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            1249        2245     8008371   83  Linux
/dev/sda6            2246        2744     4008186   83  Linux
/dev/sda7            2745        2994     2008093+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8            2995        4438    11598898+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 17.1 GB, 17179869184 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2088 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1        2088    16771828+  83  Linux

so you could opt to stick with the initial 10gb of log partition, then migrate to a larger secondary disk. if at one point you need even more space you could export the logs, unmount the secondary, mount a larger secondary, import logs

regards

Tom