I recently had a file system on a Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) metadevice fill up, and I needed to expand it to make room for some additional data. Since the expansion could potentially cause problems, I backed up the file system, and saved a copy of the metastat and df output to my local workstation. Having several backups always gives me a warm fuzzy, since I know I have a way to revert back to the old configuration if something goes awry. Once the configuration was in a safe place and the data backed up, I used the umount command to unmount the /data file system, which lives on metadevice d100:
$ df -h
Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0 7.9G 2.1G 5.7G 27% /
/devices 0K 0K 0K 0% /devices
ctfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/contract
proc 0K 0K 0K 0% /proc
mnttab 0K 0K 0K 0% /etc/mnttab
swap 2.3G 600K 2.3G 1% /etc/svc/volatile
objfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/object
/usr/lib/libc/libc_hwcap1.so.1
7.9G 2.1G 5.7G 27% /lib/libc.so.1
fd 0K 0K 0K 0% /dev/fd
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s4 4.0G 154M 3.8G 4% /var
swap 2.3G 32K 2.3G 1% /tmp
swap 2.3G 24K 2.3G 1% /var/run
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3 19G 2.8G 17G 15% /opt
/dev/md/dsk/d100 35G 35G 120M 99% /data
$ umount /data
After the file system was unmounted, I had to run the metaclear utility to remove the metadevice from the meta state database:
$ metaclear D100
d100: Concat/Stripe is cleared
Now that the metadevice was removed, I needed to add it back with the desired layout. It is EXTREMELY important to place the device(s) back in the right order, and to ensure that the new layout doesn’t corrupt the data that exists on the device(s) that contain the file system (i.e., don’t create a RAID5 metadevice with the existing devices, since that will wipe your data when the RAID5 metadevice is initialized). In my case, I wanted to concatenate another hardware RAID protected LUN to the meta device d100. This was accomplished by running metainit with the “numstripes” equal to 2 to indicate a 2 stripe concatenation, and “width” equal to 1 to indicate that each stripe should have one member:
$ metainit d100 2 1 c1t1d0s0 1 c1t2d0s0
d100: Concat/Stripe is setup
Once the new metadevice was created, I ran the mount utility to remount the /data file system, and then executed growfs to expand the file system:
$ mount /dev/md/dsk/d100 /data
$ growfs -M /data /dev/md/rdsk/d100
Warning: 2778 sector(s) in last cylinder unallocated
/dev/md/rdsk/d100: 150721830 sectors in 24532 cylinders of 48 tracks, 128 sectors
73594.6MB in 1534 cyl groups (16 c/g, 48.00MB/g, 5824 i/g)
super-block backups (for fsck -F ufs -o b=#) at:
32, 98464, 196896, 295328, 393760, 492192, 590624, 689056, 787488, 885920,
Initializing cylinder groups:
..............................
super-block backups for last 10 cylinder groups at:
149821984, 149920416, 150018848, 150117280, 150215712, 150314144, 150412576,
150511008, 150609440, 150707872
After the growfs operation completed, I had some breathing room on the /data file system:
$ df -h
Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0 7.9G 2.1G 5.7G 27% /
/devices 0K 0K 0K 0% /devices
ctfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/contract
proc 0K 0K 0K 0% /proc
mnttab 0K 0K 0K 0% /etc/mnttab
swap 2.3G 600K 2.3G 1% /etc/svc/volatile
objfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/object
/usr/lib/libc/libc_hwcap1.so.1
7.9G 2.1G 5.7G 27% /lib/libc.so.1
fd 0K 0K 0K 0% /dev/fd
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s4 4.0G 154M 3.8G 4% /var
swap 2.3G 32K 2.3G 1% /tmp
swap 2.3G 24K 2.3G 1% /var/run
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3 19G 2.8G 17G 15% /opt
/dev/md/dsk/d100 71G 36G 35G 49% /data
The fact that you have to unmount the file system to grow a metadevice is somewhat frustrating, since every other LVM package I have used allows volumes and file system to be expanded on the fly (it’s a good thing ZFS is shipping with Solaris). As with all data migrations, you should test storage expansion operations prior to performing them on production systems.