Hi,
My host and guest are CentOS 6. The guest is going to be a web server in production. I am trying to resize (extend) of the base partition of my guest. But I can of course start the installation of CentOS 6 guest all over again with a larger image size. However, just for the sake of better understanding I an trying to solve things not to be end up in a dead end after some years.
1. I created a guest CentOS 6 with 12G total disk (on a iscsi drive). No Desktop, just for terminal use. No LVM, just a simple basic partitioning. 2. Later I wanted to increase the size of total image to 200G. 3. I managed to resize the image to 200G on my iscsi drive. So, there is 188G unallocated/unformatted volume within the guest image.
Now, the hardest part. I have to resize the partition. I have been trying to find a way to do that. A search on Google showed that GParted is tool to do that. I had to install all Desktop and X as Gparted is a GUI tool. Installed vncserver. Then, I found out that GParted can not resize the live guest. So, I downloaded GParted Live CD.
Now, the questions:
1. If it was a physical machine I would boot from the CD. If I can boot it from host CDROM but then how should I operate on a specific guest? What is the easiest way to access GUI of the guest if I boot from Live CD. 2. I am wondering if a simple LVM route at the beginning would be preferred. Changing size of the iscsi volume on my NAS is easy. I thought there was no need for more complication, so went with basic /boot / and swap partitions. Is resizing partitions for LVM easier than basic partitioning (without LVM)? 3. Is there a specific tool in KVM suit which performs resizing partition within the image? Or as I prefer command line tools, is there a way to achieve resizing without any graphical tool like GParted? With GParted I had to install all the X and Gnome files, vncserver which otherwise I don't need.
I would appreciate any information/hint/experience.
All the best.