[CentOS-virt] Resize guest filesystem question

Jeff Boyce jboyce at meridianenv.com
Fri Feb 24 15:05:55 EST 2012


Greetings -

I am going through some testing steps to expand a logical volume and the 
corresponding filesystem on a KVM guest and have run across a deficiency in 
my knowledge.  I spent the afternoon yesterday googling for answers, but had 
have come up blank still.  What I am trying to do is resize the file system 
to use the additional disk space that I added to the logical volume that the 
guest uses.  Here is what I have done and the details of my system.

0.  Both my host and guest are running Centos 6.2.

1.  My KVM host system has the LVM volume group that is divided into logical 
volumes which are then presented to the KVM guests as raw space.

2.  A guest may use 2 or 3 logical volumes from the host system for its 
filesystem (/, /var, /data) and I have logical volumes named within the host 
system by guest and mount point so that I know what each logical volume is 
assigned to by it's name.

3.  I expanded a specific logical volume on the host (/dev/vg/lv_guest1root) 
that is used by Guest1, and I can see in vgdisplay and lvdisplay that the 
logical volume was properly expanded.

4.  I then issued a  resize2fs /dev/vg/lv_guest1root  command (on the host) 
to resize the filesystem to the expanded logical volume.  This resulted in a 
message that it essentially couldn't find a valid filesystem superblock. 
Well of course then I realized that there is no filesystem on the logical 
volume from the perspective of the host.  The filesystem wasn't set on the 
logical volume until the guest installation occurred.

5.  So then I switched over to the guest system and ran  df -h  to see the 
existing filesystem

[root at guest1 jeffb]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda2             4.5G  2.3G  2.0G  53% /
tmpfs                1004M   88K 1004M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/vda1             485M   30M  430M   7% /boot
/dev/vdb1             2.0G  219M  1.7G  12% /var

6.  Then I ran  resize2fs /dev/vda2  and got the result that the filesystem 
is already xx blocks long.  Nothing to do!

So here is where I am stuck.  Guest1 is my test system so it only has the / 
and /var logical volumes, whereas the production guest (guest2) that I will 
be expanding also has /data, which will be the logical volume that I will 
expand.  So two things I did not do where, I did not shut down the guest VM, 
and I did not unmount the filesystem before asking it to resize.  However my 
research before doing this did not seem to indicate that I had to do either, 
and the message about nothing to do also seems to indicate that they were 
not necessary.

So I am missing a hole in my knowledge and additional googling has not 
helped to fill it.  I must be missing something simple.  Is this result due 
to the fact that I am testing on expanding the / filesystem, and it would 
work properly on a guest system that had  /data?  Do I need to unmount the 
filesystem, or shut down the guest VM, or mount the guest from a LiveCD?  Or 
do I need to give it  resize2fs /dev/vda  rather than specifically 
/dev/vda2 ?  Any clues, or pointers to good documentation is greatly 
appreciated.  Thanks.

Jeff Boyce
Meridian Environmental
www.meridianenv.com 



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