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, the shutdown 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. The shutdown and poweroff 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.

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