How to expand the Messaging Gateway disk on virtual infrastructure

Products

• Messaging Gateway

Issue/Introduction

In some situations it may be necessary to increase the amount of disk space allocated to a Messaging Gateway (SMG) virtual machine to accommodate increased log or quarantine storage requirements. Prior to SMG 10.8.0 it was not possible to expand the SMG filesystem even though the underlying virtual disk had been expanded. This has been addressed with the 10.8.0 and later releases.

Warning

10.8.0

Modification of the disk on an installed Messaging Gateway system carries with it some risk of filesystem corruption, loss of data, or in extreme cases loss of function of the SMG instance. Additionally, attempting to expand the disk space on SMG systems originally installed with a version prior to 10.6.0 will either result in the system becoming unstable and loss of all data (10.8.0) or in a warning that the filesystem cannot be safely expanded (10.8.1 and later).

It is highly recommended that both a virtual machine snapshot be taken before modifying the SMG system and also a full backup be collected if the SMG system is a Control Center host.

10.8.1 and later

The grow-disk command will issue a warning if the underlying disk subsystem is incompatible and cannot be expanded:

smg [10.8.1-2]> grow-disk --status
Incompatible file system found.
grow-disk can only be run on a system originally installed with SMG 10.6.0 or later.

Environment

Release : 10.8.0

Resolution

To expand the disk space available to SMG for virtual machines under VMWare, Hyper-V, and Linux KVM:

1. Shut down the Messaging Gateway virtual machine
2. Take a snapshot of the existing SMG VM (optional but highly recommended - previous snapshots needs to be removed, otherwise there is no possibility to expand the disk)
3. Expand the underlying virtual disk via the standard method for your particular virtual infrastructure / hypervisor. Please see your virtual infrastructure documentation for details on how to expand the virtual disk.
4. Start the Messaging Gateway virtual machine. The system will not show the newly available disk space as available.
5. Log into the SMG command line interface as `admin`
6. Run `grow-disk --status` to confirm that additional free disk space is available
7. Run the `grow-disk` command. This will expand the /data filesystem on SMG to take advantage of the newly available disk space and restart the SMG system.

Additional Information

grow-disk

usage: grow-disk [ --resize | --status ]

options:
    -r, --resize
        Just perform the final resize of the filesystem
        Will perform a reboot
    -s, --status
        Show the characteristics of the physical disk and partitions,
        but make no changes

    If no option is provided, the system will be rebooted, and the disk
    partition table will be modified to increase the size of the /data
    partition to the maximum space available.