Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Modifying Existing Local Zone File Systems On Solaris 10 Unix

Hey There,

Today's post is a follow-up to yesterday's post on creating new file systems in a local zone on Solaris 10. Today, we're moving on to a simple how-to on modifying existing local zones. As some of you may have noticed, with yesterday's post, I managed to blithely bypass the creation of the local zone we were working on. It's generally required that you create (or make) a local zone before you can add a filesystem to it ;) Although this topic is covered within our previous post on setting up Branded Linux zones in Solaris 10, we'll attack zone creation and initial setup at the end of this short series of posts, just so it has its own place and isn't presented in a, possibly, unfamiliar context.

Today's bit of work is a nifty trick because, although it seems that there should be some "special way" to modify an existing filesystem in a Solaris 10 zone, it's really about as simple, or as difficult, as you make it ( For this example, we'll be consistent with yesterday's post and have the "DING" local zone's "DONG" filesystem be of the type VxFS ).

NOTE: This caveat carries over from our previous post, as well. When modifying existing filesystems on a Solaris 10 local zone, all changes must be made to the filesystem from the global zone!

1. Log into your global zone again. This is generally just the "host" or what we used to think of (before zones or containers) as "the box" or "the computer." Then, check out the filesystem you want to modify, with "df -k|grep DONG" (or something similar), like so:

host # df -h|grep DONG
/dev/vx/dsk/DINGdg/DONGvol 6547824 24356 6523468 1% /DONG


2. Now, you can simply resize (shrink, grow, etc -- this part is heavily dependent on your filesystem and its capabilities) as you would normally. We've attacked the following procedure in much more depth in our previous post on adding and managing storage with Veritas Volume Manager, so we'll leave this example boiled down to the essentials. For our example, we want to add 10 Gb of space to the "DONG" filesystem. And, we can do so, just as simply as if we were modifying any other VxFS filesystem, like this:

host # vxresize -g DINGdg DONGvol +10g

3. And that's it! Now all we have to do is verify that the filesystem actually grew, by issuing the exact same command we did in step 1. It should be noted that we used "vxresize" specifically (rather than "vxassist -growby") so that we wouldn't have to run two commands to increase the capacity of the volume and grow the filesystem on it. Depending on your situation, you may need to do both separately, but you'll still be following standard protocol for whatever disk management tool you prefer to use, rather than modifying your method to suit Solaris:

host # df -h|grep DONG
/dev/vx/dsk/DINGdg/DONGvol 17033584 24356 17009228 1% /DONG


And, there you go. Simple as pie, and the work week is just about half over :)

Cheers,

, Mike




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