Twisted IT paired

Taken from https://blog.khmersite.net/2020/11/how-to-expand-qcow2/

Let’s check what is the current size.

# qemu-img info hosta.qcow2
image: hosta.qcow2
file format: qcow2
virtual size: 30 GiB (32212254720 bytes)
disk size: 1.18 GiB
cluster_size: 65536
Format specific information:
compat: 1.1
compression type: zlib
lazy refcounts: true
refcount bits: 16
corrupt: false
Let’s add 20GiB to this disk to make it to 50GiB.

# qemu-img resize hosta.qcow2 +20G
Image resized.
Next we need to resize the filesystem on this disk. There are a few ways to do this such as attaching this hostq.qcow2 to another VM and expand it there, or just manually grow the LVM volume group in my case. However, I found a really cool way by using the virt-resize command.

# cp hosta.qcow2 hosta-orig.qcow2
Then carefully instruct the virt-resize to expand the correct partition. On my server, /dev/sda1 is used for /boot and /dev/sda2 is used as a LVM physical volume.

There is a nice trick to display the disk filesystem on a (KVM) VM.

# virt-filesystems --long -h --all -a hosta.qcow2
Name Type VFS Label MBR Size Parent
/dev/sda1 filesystem xfs - - 1014M -
/dev/cl/root filesystem xfs - - 27G -
/dev/cl/swap filesystem swap - - 2.0G -
/dev/cl/root lv - - - 27G /dev/cl
/dev/cl/swap lv - - - 2.0G /dev/cl
/dev/cl vg - - - 29G /dev/sda2
/dev/sda2 pv - - - 29G -
/dev/sda1 partition - - 83 1.0G /dev/sda
/dev/sda2 partition - - 8e 29G /dev/sda
/dev/sda device - - - 50G -
From the above output, we can see that the /dev/sda has already been expanded to 50GiB. But the /dev/sda2 is still only 29GiB (1GiB has been allocated to /dev/sda1 for the Boot partition.) So let’s expand the /dev/sda2.

# virt-resize --expand /dev/sda2 hosta-orig.qcow2 hosta.qcow2
[ 0.0] Examining hosta-orig.qcow2
**********

Summary of changes:

/dev/sda1: This partition will be left alone.

/dev/sda2: This partition will be resized from 29.0G to 49.0G. The LVM PV
on /dev/sda2 will be expanded using the ‘pvresize’ method.

**********
[ 3.7] Setting up initial partition table on hosta.qcow2
[ 4.8] Copying /dev/sda1
[ 6.9] Copying /dev/sda2
100% ⟦▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒⟧ 00:00
[ 30.3] Expanding /dev/sda2 using the ‘pvresize’ method

Resize operation completed with no errors. Before deleting the old disk,
carefully check that the resized disk boots and works correctly.
Let’s verify our result.

# virt-filesystems --long -h --all -a hosta.qcow2
Name Type VFS Label MBR Size Parent
/dev/sda1 filesystem xfs - - 1014M -
/dev/cl/root filesystem xfs - - 27G -
/dev/cl/swap filesystem swap - - 2.0G -
/dev/cl/root lv - - - 27G /dev/cl
/dev/cl/swap lv - - - 2.0G /dev/cl
/dev/cl vg - - - 49G /dev/sda2
/dev/sda2 pv - - - 49G -
/dev/sda1 partition - - 83 1.0G /dev/sda
/dev/sda2 partition - - 8e 49G /dev/sda
/dev/sda device - - - 50G -
On the background, virt-manager actually created a temporary VM, perform the disk expansion, virt-filesystem check and remove that VM upon completion.