Upgrades
VPSs can be upgraded at any time using the customer control panel. Once upgraded, you will need to take the additional steps described on this page in order to apply the upgrade.
From time to time, we upgrade all the servers in our range. We will notify you by email when this happens, and you should follow these steps to complete your VPS ugrade.
Applying upgrades
In order to apply upgrades to your VPS, you must shutdown and restart your
server. Please note that a complete shutdown is required; a reboot is not
sufficient. The best way to do this is from within your operating system (e.g.
shutdown -h now on Linux).
Once shutdown, you can restart the server using the Start button in the control panel.
In the case of disk upgrades, you must explicitly apply the disk while the server is stopped. This can be done using the Apply Upgrade button in the control panel.
Resizing your disk
If you installed your server using our automated installer, your server's file system should be automatically resized to make use of all available space.
In other cases, your virtual disk will be resized, but you will need to re-partition and then resize your file system in order to take advantage of the additional 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, following the steps below:
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. In order to use
it, we must add it to your main volume group. These instructions assume that
this is called mainvg but you can check what volume groups are actually in
use on your system using the pvs command.
To make the new partition available to LVM, and add it to the mainvg volume
groups, use the following commands:
kpvcreate /dev/sda6 vgextend mainvg /dev/sda6
Extend the logical volume
Assuming that we want to give all the extra space to a single logical
volume, which is called root in the mainvg volume group, use the following command:
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.