On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 6:12 PM, Tom H <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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.

I'm not 100% sure how to check for that, since I'm not a Windows admin
either. But I never saw an option when I installed Windows, to choose
the type of disk. I could pretty much only select NTFS or eFAT (I
think).

I'll play with this again next week sometime, with a test Windows
virtual Machine, and see if I can come up with something. For the time
being I had to setup the server for our developer to demo an VB.Net
application to a client so I can't modify it now.

-- 
Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers
SoftDux

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