Openstack Instance disk resizing

Question

I have recently setup an Openstack environment for learning purpose.

All openstack services are running on single machine.

Everything is working fine.

I have one Windows 2012 instance running on this openstack.

It has 100 GB space allocated to C partition.

When I am trying to expand the partition for this instance from 100 GB to 200 GB, it took around two hours to complete the process.

This is the only instance I am currently running on this openstack environment.

Is there any way, I can speedup the process of increasing the root partition size for the instance ?

Answer 1

The speed of the resize will more than likely depend on your machine. If there are any errors related to the resize they should be in the logs. The use case will probably be easier to modify than the speed of the resize.

In a production environments the Windows root disk will usually be smaller than what you are used to on a physical machine. To add more storage to an instance you would end up using block storage/volumes (Cinder.) This allows you to create a disk, attach it(D:, E:, F:), and then detach at any time if needed to attach it to another instance. This allows you to minimize what is installed on the root partition for Windows and it gives you more flexibility when dealing with disk sizes. An added benefit is the ability to move your data around.

Basic OpenStack installations may not include Cinder. Cinder is a common service that is installed in most production environments - which means it is worth learning if you want to manage OpenStack clouds.

Answer 2

Resizing the instance may help.

Create a flavor that fits your needs: root disk size with 200g

click the instance -> resize the vm -> select the flavor with double sized disk.

Then your vm will be resized to the size you specified in flavor.