Expanding your A3 System Drive

Problem: Your A3 root partition ("/") is running low on space

Solution: Grow the disk, partition, and filesystem

While all of your backup data for the A3 resides on your ADS or ODS storage, however InstaBoot (Instant Restore) delta data does reside on the A3's system drive by default, and can take significant amounts of storage, depending on the workload and length of time the restored systems run on the A3.

So, to provide more space for your A3, you can simply grow the disk as shown below. Alternatively, if you wish to move the Instaboot storage area to a different disk entirely, you can follow this guide.

Please ensure your Alike services are stopped before proceeding!

1) Determine your root partition and disk location by running the command "df -h /" on the A3 console. By default it resides on /dev/xvda2 Please note the partition number "eg 2", as it will be used in later steps

alike@a3h:~$ df -h /
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda2               11.6G      5.4G      5.6G  49% /

2) Grow your A3 disk (eg. xvda) to the desired size in your hypervisor management tooling (XenCenter, Hyper-V Manager, etc)

3) Install the Linux package "cloud-utils-growpart"

alike@3d:~$ sudo apk add cloud-utils-growpart
(1/3) Installing partx (2.37.4-r0)
(2/3) Installing sfdisk (2.37.4-r0)
(3/3) Installing cloud-utils-growpart (0.32-r5)
Executing busybox-1.34.1-r7.trigger
OK: 410 MiB in 187 packages

4) Expand the partition using "growpart". Run the command "sudo growpart /dev/xvda 2"

This will expand the partition to fill the new space you provided

alike@a3h:~$ sudo growpart /dev/xvda 2
[sudo] password for alike:
CHANGED: partition=2 start=206848 old: size=100456415 end=100663263 new: size=134010847 end=134217695

5) Now resize your filesystem to expand to the size of the new partition.

sudo resize2fs /dev/xvda2
resize2fs 1.46.6 (1-Feb-2023)
Filesystem at /dev/xvda2 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old_desc_blocks = 6, new_desc_blocks = 8
The filesystem on /dev/xvda2 is now 16751355 (4k) blocks long.

6) Finally, you can confirm the changes with

alike@a3h:~$ df -h /
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda2               62.8G      1.4G     58.7G   2% /

7) You are now finished and can start your Alike services again from the console menu