On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 6:06 AM, Rudi Ahlers <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 4:30 PM, Tom H <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 8:56 AM, Rudi Ahlers <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>> Can anyone please tell me, or direct me to a website with
>>> instructions, how to resize a Windows based KVM guest, when the
>>> Windows KVM guest is setup on LVM?
>>>
>>> The host server runs on CentOS 6, with no GUI installed.
>>>
>>> The following website have a good explanation of the steps to take,
>>> but I need a GUI installed which I don't:
>>> http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/how-resize-your-kvm-virtual-disk
>>
>> Can you clarify what "Windows KVM guest is setup on LVM" means? Does
>> it simply mean that the virtual disk is on an LV?
>>
>> As the link above shows, it's a two-step procedure. You first have to
>> increase the size of the kvm disk on the host and then increase the
>> size of the disk and the filesystem on the guest from within the
>> guest.
>>
>> For the first step, assuming that you have the space to do so, the
>> only thing that you need to do on the host is "qemu-img resize ...".
>>
>> For the second step, I don't understand why the disk isn't resized
>> within the Windows guest, whether with the "Disk Management" GUI tool
>> or the "diskpart" CLI tool (for later versions of Windows there's a
>> limitation that the space into which a partition has to be extended
>> has to be contiguous to the partition).
>>
>> If you really want to go down the same route as the link, you have to
>> add the disk to a Linux VM and resize it from within that VM. At the
>> CLI you can use fdisk or parted. With fdisk, you have to delete and
>> recreate the partition. With parted, you can resize it. I've done this
>> with extX but never with ntfs so, if I were you, I'd dupe the virtual
>> disk and run a test to ensure that it works.


> Well, it means that I have a Windows based KVM guest virtual machine,
> which is setup on the host node with LVM, instead of a file based
> container.

I thought that this wasn't possible but I've just asked a colleague
and he says that I misunderstood; we've decided not to use this.
Neither he nor two other colleagues know why!


> But it seems that Windows 2003 server's boot partition can't be
> dynamically resized and I ended up reinstalling Windows

It can be if the unallocated space is contiguous. I think, but I'm far
less familiar with Windows than I used to be, that if your boot
volume's a "dynamic disk", it can be resized even if the unallocated
space isn't contiguous.