If your Antsle antlets are running out of storage space, add a new virtual drive.
If you use an Antsle device for your data center virtual machines, you might have run into a situation where a VM has run out of space, or you simply need to expand the storage for a newly added service to the machine. When that happens, what do you do? You add a new virtual drive to the virtual machine.
Let's find out how that's done.
What you need
You will need an Antsle with a virtual machine running. I'll demonstrate by creating a virtual drive for a running instance of Ubuntu Server 18.04. Should you add the drive to a different platform, you'll need to alter some of the instructions to suit the platform in question.
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Creating the drive
The first thing you must do is create the new virtual drive. To do this, log into your Antsle and click on the name of your virtual machine (aka "antlet"). In the resulting window, click the Virtual Drives tab. From within that tab, click New Virtual Drive (Figure A).
Figure A: The Virtual Drives tab in the Antlet configuration window.
In the resulting window (Figure B), give the virtual drive a name, configure the size, and click Create virtual drive.
Figure B: Configuring your new virtual drive.
If you go back into the Virtual Drives tab, you'll now see the new virtual drive with an associated name (Figure C). You'll need that name later.
Figure C: Our virtual drive's name is vda.
Formatting the drive
You can now start the virtual machine. If the virtual machine was running when you added the virtual drive, you must issue a force stop of the antlet. To do that, click the Stop dropdown and click Force stop. Once the VM stops, restart it, and the unformatted drive will be recognized by the guest operating system. The next thing to do is format and mount the virtual drive. Here's how:
- Log into the virtual machine.
- Format the new drive with the command sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/vda.
- Create a new directory to mount the drive with the command sudo mkdir /mnt/data (You can name the new mount point whatever you like).
- Mount the new drive with the command sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/vda /mnt/data.
Automount the drive
At this point your new drive is mounted and useable to the operating system. However, you do want to make sure the drive automounts at boot. To do this, you must add an entry to /etc/fstab. Issue the command:
sudo nano /etc/fstab
At the bottom of this file, add the following:
/dev/vda /mnt/data ext4 defaults 1 2
Save and close that file. Your new drive should now be available to the operating system even if you reboot the machine. If you issue the command df -a you should see the new drive is available (Figure D).
Figure D: Our new drive is ready to be used.
Enjoy the new space
Congratulations! Within about two minutes, you added a virtual drive to your virtual machine, thereby expanding the amount of storage space available. Enjoy that new space.
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