VPS upgrades
VPS upgrades
You can ask us at any time to upgrade your VPS to any higher specification from our range of virtual servers. (Currently the best way to order an upgrade is to email us.) Also, from time to time, we upgrade all the servers in our range. We will notify you by email when this happens. Follow these steps to complete your VPS ugrade.
- shutdown
-
You can shut down your VPS from within the operating system using one of the
usual commands, such as
shutdown -h now
. Alternatively, from the admin shell, theshutdown
command may work (it depends on ACPI support in the operating system). As a last resort,poweroff
in the admin shell will definitely work, but may cause data loss. Theshutdown
andpoweroff
functions are also available from the control panel. - upgrade
-
Once your VPS has been shut down, upgrading is as simple as typing the
upgrade
command at the admin shell. This can take several minutes to run if disk space has been added. - start
-
Finally, boot your server again with the
start
command at the admin shell, or equivalent function in the control panel.
Any upgrades to RAM and CPU are immediately available to your VPS. For disk upgrades, the virtual disk is extended, but the new space will be unpartitioned space at the end of the disk. To make it available to your operating system, you will need to repartition.
Although repartitioning is not particularly complex, it can be a bit daunting if you've never done it before. On this page we outline the steps involved, but the exact commands to use will be different in each case, since they depend both on whatever existing partitions you have, as well as what you want to do with the new space.
If you have our managed server option, then we are more than happy to repartition for you: please email to discuss your requirements.
If you are an unmanaged customer, we can provide advice by email in the usual way, or perform the repartitioning for you as chargeable consultancy work.
LVM
If you use LVM for your VPS's major partitions, all the necessary steps can be performed while the system is up in multi-user mode.
create a new partition
Use parted /dev/sda
to create a new partition in the free space at
the end of the disk. If you are using an MSDOS label with an extended
partition (which will be partition 2), you will first need to use the
resize
command to extend that partition to fill the entire
disk.
add it to LVM
You now have a new physical volume, for example /dev/sda6
.
Make this available to LVM with the command pvcreate
/dev/sda6
, and add it to your main volume group with
vgextend volgroup /dev/sda6
Most setups only have
a single volume group, which may be called mainvg
, or have
the same name as your server. Use pvs
to see what physical
volumes (PV) and volume groups (VG) are in use.
extend the logical volume
Assume that we want to give all the extra space to a single logical
volume, which is called root
in the volume group
mainvg
. The command to use would be
lvextend -l +100%FREE mainvg/root
resize the file system
The free space is now in the right logical volume, but we still need to make it
available to the file system. Fortunately, this is simple: just invoke
resize2fs
with the name of the logical volume device and no other
arguments: it will expand the file system to completely fill the device.
For example, resize2fs /dev/mapper/mainvg-root
Resizing with parted
If you are not using LVM, you can usually use the parted command to resize the last partition of a disk.
If the last partition is a swap partition, you can take it out of
service with swapoff
, delete it, and resize the formerly
last-but-one partition, leaving enough free space after it to re-create
a new swap partition.
Resizing by hand
If for some reason you can't use the resize
command of
parted, you will have to resize the partition manually. To do this, you
will need to boot into a recovery environment. Start by
using parted to examine the disk, with units of sectors. Copy and paste (or
write down very carefully) the existing partition starts and ends. Now delete
and re-create the partition, being certain to preserve the same start
sector, as well as the partition type and any flags. Check that you can still
boot your operating system. Finally, use resize2fs
to resize the
file system.