Can I use Webmin Logical Volume Management to extend the existing Volume being used by Virtualmin?
Virtualmin shows total disk space of 100GB (ubuntu-lv) but 7.27TB Logical Volume Group (ubuntu-vg) that were created by the default Ubuntu 24.04.1 installer on an 8TB RAID drive.
However I want to expand the size of the Virtualmin available disk space, preferably all of the remaining free space on ubuntu-vg.
When I look at the options in the Webmin Logical Volume Management I see that I can create a logical volume within ubuntu-vg but do not see that I can expand the only currently existing volume named ubuntu-vg (100 GB) with is being used by Virtualmin.
Is there a way to expand the existing volume? Or, if I create another larger volume can I expect Virtualmin to be able to use the two volumes?
Disk partitions and volumes and filesystems have nothing to do with Virtualmin. Virtualmin uses the system you give it.
No. Virtualmin expects to put domain homes in /home, databases in the usual locations (in /var), and logs in the usual locations (also in /var). Those are the primary disk space users in a Virtualmin system, so those are the things you want to give plenty of space to. Making / consume the majority of your disk is reasonable. There isn’t really any reason to split up partitions into a bunch of filesystems/volumes, anymore. Just /boot and / is reasonable, or whatever your OS wants to do (unless your OS is stupid like Ubuntu and defaults to only using 100GB total, in which case you need to tell it to not be stupid).
Well I was concerned this might be a problem, which is why I would rather extend the existing volume.
However, now that Virtualmin is installed on a live system I don’t want to take it offline for the amount of time it would take to re-install ubuntu (and override the 100GB volume size default … don’t know how to do this yet either) then re-install Virtualmin and restore the backups from the running system … seems like it might take more than a few hours.
Any suggestions?
I don’t know of a reason to have more than 1 very large volume and regret not finding out how small the existing volume is until after Virtualmin manage websites went live.
Expand the volume and the filesystem. Haven’t we already discussed this, including links to documentation about expanding volumes and filesystems?
Maybe we should move past the “what else could I do other than the thing I need to do” and move on to what problems you’re having with doing what needs to be done? I can answer questions about technical problems, but conceptually you’re making up new problems to avoid the only reasonable solution and I don’t really think anyone benefits from that kind of talking around the problem.
Just do the thing. Ask questions about what you don’t understand about the thing. Don’t make up new things just because the thing seems intimidating.
Yes, did discuss already. That produced what seemed to be a good suggestion to use Webmin Logical Volume Management to create more disk space for Virtualmin to use … from ID10T … which I viewed as potentially the right way to do it.
I doubt that going directly to using the root UID on Ubuntu to expand the 100GB volume to the full size of the disk will be any better that using Webmin Logical Volume Management … IFF it does work the way that ID10T seems to believe … and I was hoping that it does … haven’t tried it yet, and don’t want to experiment on a live system.
I haven’t done this with Linux before, and want to avoid learning how on a live system.
If you’re concerned about doing it in Webmin, just do it on the command line. You’ll need to do the filesystem resize on the command line, anyway, probably, since I don’t think Webmin’s Disk and Network Filesystems module knows how to resize (but maybe it does, I haven’t looked around lately).
This doesn’t have to be scary stuff. Volumes are really quite nice and user-friendly. Just read the docs until you understand the concepts, and do the thing. Take your time. There’s loads of documentation about LVM and filesystems. Resizing is a super common thing. You’ll find literally hundreds of links about it and probably dozens of videos, if you prefer YouTube University.
And, you can ask specific questions, and I can answer them.
Also, probably don’t ask ChatGPT without confirming with authoritative sources as well. ChatGPT lies too much for critical things. ChatGPT will be happy to talk to you about anything, but it never admits to not knowing something or misunderstanding a question.
It is good to know that you were able to extend a volume. I think our versions of Virtualmin & Webmin are different. I think mine is probably the latest. I could not see a way to do the same on my version.
Here is a screenshot of the Webmin > Hardware > Logical Volume Management > Logical Volumes page on my version. I think your version of the same page is different.
Can you reply with the version of Webmin and Virualmin that you are using … perhaps there is a function that your instance has that does actually expand existing active volumes that has been removed with the latest release?
Or, from looking at your image more closely it appears that the volume name is home. Is this a second volume? Do you have another volume with a name like *lv that is the original volume used by Virtualmin?
If you do … then I think that means that Virtualmin can use two volumes, not just one.
