Programmatic Ponderings

Expand the size of Oracle’s Pre-Built Development VM’s (virtual appliances) to accommodate software package updates and additional software installations.

Introduction

In my last post, Using Oracle’s Pre-Built Enterprise Java VM for Development Testing, I discussed issues with the small footprint of the VM. Oracle’s Pre-Built Enterprise Java Development VM, aka virtual appliance, is comprised of (2) 8 GB Virtual Machine Disks (VMDK). The small size of the VM made it impossible to update the system software, or install new applications. After much trial and error, and a few late nights reading posts by others who had run into this problem, I found a fairly easy series of steps to increase the size of the VM. In the following example, I’ll demonstrate how to resize the VM’s virtual disks to 15 GB each; you can resize the disks to whatever size you need.

Terminology

Before we start, a few quick terms. It’s not critical to have a complete understanding of Linux’s Logical Volume Manager (LVM). However, without some basic knowledge of how Linux manages virtual disks and physical storage, the following process might seem a bit confusing. I pulled the definitions directly from Wikipedia and LVM How-To.

• Logical Volume Manager (LVM) – LVM is a logical volume manager for the Linux kernel; it manages disk drivers and similar mass-storage devices.
• Volume Group (VG) – Highest level abstraction within the LVM. Gathers Logical Volumes (LV) and Physical Volumes (PV) into one administrative unit.
• Physical Volume (PV) – Typically a hard disk, or any device that ‘looks’ like a hard disk (eg. a software raid device).
• Logical Volume (LV) – Equivalent of disk partition in a non-LVM system. Visible as a standard block device; as such the LV can contain a file system (eg. /home).
• Logical Extents (LE) – Each LV is split into chunks of data, known as logical extents. The extent size is the same for all logical volumes in the volume group. The system pools LEs into a VG. The pooled LEs can then be concatenated together into virtual disk partitions (LV).
• Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) – Container for virtual hard disk drives used in virtual machines. Developed by VMware for its virtual appliance products, but is now an open format.
• Virtual Disk Image (VDI) – VirtualBox-specific container format for storing files on the host operating system.

Ten Simple Steps

After having downloaded, assembled, and imported the original virtual appliance into VirtualBox Manager on my Windows computer, I followed the these simple steps to enlarge the size of the VM’s (2) 8 GB VMDK files:

1. Locate the VM’s virtual disk images;
2. Clone VMDK files to VDI files;
3. Resize VDI files;
4. Replace VM’s original VMDK files;
5. Boot VM using GParted Live;
6. Resize VDI partitions;
7. Resize Logical Volume (LV);
8. Resize file system;
9. Restart the VM;
10. Delete the original VMDK files.

Original VM in VirtualBox Manager Before Resizing

Original View of VM Before Resizing and Software Updates

1. Locate the VM’s virtual disk images

• From the Windows command line, run the following command to find information about virtual disk images currently in use by VirtualBox.
• Locate the (2) VMDK images associated with the VM you are going to resize.

cd C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox
VBoxManage list hdds

Two Virtual Disk Images in use by VM

2. Clone the (2) VMDK files to VDI files (substitute your own file paths and VMDK file names)

VBoxManage clonehd "C:\Users\your_username\VirtualBox VMs\VDD_WLS_labs_2012\VDD_WLS_labs_2012-disk1.vmdk" "C:\Users\your_username\VirtualBox VMs\VDD_WLS_labs_2012\VDD_WLS_labs_2012-disk1_ext.vdi" --format vdi
VBoxManage clonehd "C:\Users\your_username\VirtualBox VMs\VDD_WLS_labs_2012\VDD_WLS_labs_2012-disk2.vmdk" "C:\Users\your_username\VirtualBox VMs\VDD_WLS_labs_2012\VDD_WLS_labs_2012-disk2_ext.vdi" --format vdi

3. Resize the (2) VDI files

To calculate the new size, multiple the number of gigabytes you want to end up with by 1,024 (ie. 15 x 1,024 = 15,360)

VBoxManage modifyhd "C:\Users\your_username\VirtualBox VMs\VDD_WLS_labs_2012\VDD_WLS_labs_2012-disk1_ext.vdi" --resize 15360
VBoxManage modifyhd "C:\Users\your_username\VirtualBox VMs\VDD_WLS_labs_2012\VDD_WLS_labs_2012-disk2_ext.vdi" --resize 15360

4. Replace the VM’s original VMDK files with the VDI files

• Using VirtualBox Manger -> Settings -> Storage, replace the (2) original VMDK files with the new VDI files.
• Keep the Attributes -> Hard Disk set to the same SATA Port 0 and SATA Port 1 of the original VMDK files.

VirtualBox Manager Showing VM with Larger Disks and GParted Live ISO

5. Boot VM using the GParted Live ISO image

• Download GParted Live ISO image to the host system (Windows).
• Mount the GParted ISO (Devices -> CD/DVD Devices -> Chose a virtual CD/DVD disk file…).
• Start the VM, hit f12 as VM boots up, and select CD/DVD (option c).
• Answer a few questions for GParted to boot up properly.

6. Using GParted, resize the (2) VDI partitions

• Expand the ‘/dev/sda2’ and ‘/dev/sdb1’ partitions to use all unallocated space (in gray below).

7. Resize Logical Volume (LV)

• Using the Terminal, resize the Logical Volume to the new size of the VDI (‘/dev/sda’).

lvresize -L +7GB /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

8. Resize file system

• Using the Terminal, resize the file system to match Logical Volume size.

resize2fs -p /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00

9. Restart the VM

• Restart the VM, hit f12 as it’s booting up, and select ‘1) Hard disk’ as the boot device.
• Open the Terminal and enter ‘df -hT’ to confirm your results.
• You can now safely install YUM Server configuration to update software packages, and install new applications.

Final View of VM After Resizing and Software Updates

10. Delete the original VMDK files

• Once you sure everything worked, don’t forget to delete the original VMDK files. They are taking up 16 GB of disk space.

Links

Here are links to the two posts where I found most of the above information:

1. How to resize a VirtualBox vmdk file
2. LVM Resizing Guide – Grow File System