LiquidFiles Documentation
LiquidFiles Documentation
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Expanding disk size

The default LiquidFiles system installs everything in one big disk. If you are running out of disk space, you have a couple of basic options for getting more space available to LiquidFiles.

The main benefit of using a split disk method for the system, application and data is that you can use different storage media. This way you can store the operating system and application on high redundant/low(er) performance storage, and the data on low(er) redundancy/high performance storage. This will ensure maximum performance and stability for the LiquidFiles system. The drawback of using a separate data disk is that you cannot use the builtin tools to expand the disks if you use separate data disks.

The main benefit of using NFS is that storage problems will be handled outside of LiquidFiles and increasing the available storage to LiquidFiles is just a matter of increasing the availble storage in the NAS/NFS server. If you have installed in a virtual environment, and depending on your network and available hardware, this can also give a performance increase as the data is not stored in virtual disks that typically offers relatively poor performance.

Increasing the disk size

This will naturally only apply to virtual systems.

If you use the standard disk partitioning (one big drive), you can increase the disk in VMware (and possibly other virtualization software). That will increase the disk, to increase the filesystem, you need to run F2 → expand disk. After a reboot, the filesystem will be expanded and you will be able to use the extra space.

If you run the custom disk configuration or run a custom partion, you may be able to expand the filesystem if it's the last filesystem on the disk. If the 'expand disk' script fails, you may still be able to expand the filesystem. Please see this report from a customer.

Booted Gparted on the VM. Deactivated the LVM partition, then did a partition check on it so LVM could see the whole thing. Reactivate and power down. Then booted with the liquid files iso into recovery mode. Lvextend on the volume, then fsresize. Reboot into liquid files and it sees the extra space.

Adding a data disk

Please note that if you choose to use this option, you cannot go back to using everything in one big disk and using the Increase disk method instead. Also, if you move the data to a new disk, all the data will be stored on the new disk, the data won't be split between the systems, or combined to share the data or anything like that.

When you add a new disk to LiquidFiles, you first have to reboot the system to make it visible to the kernel. After that you can go to Admin → Data Disk, select the new data disk, reboot and on the next reboot all the data will be moved to the new disk. Please note that this only applies to the LiquidFiles data, not the operating system or the LiquidFiles application. You won't be able to remove the root disk so from now on you will need to use two disks. If you run out of disk space again, you can add another disk and repeat this procedure. When completed you can remove the first data disk, but the original system disk will always be needed for the system to function.

If you have created say a 100Gb original disk and want to add another 50Gb of storage using this method, you will have to add a 150Gb data disk and keeping the existing 100GB disk that the operating system and application is installed. You may be better of installing a new system with say a 5Gb system disk and a 150Gb data disk and then migrate from the old to the new system using this article as reference: Migrate to New Server Documentation. That way you won't end up with a 100GB disk that is only used for the system and will be mostly empty.