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Resizing Hetzner Cloud Block Storage Volumes on the Fly
- Authors
- Name
- Ruan Bekker
- @ruanbekker
Today we will be looking into Hetzner's Cloud Storage Volumes and how you can resize volumes on the fly!
What is Hetzner's Cloud Storage Volumes
Hetzner Cloud offers a fast, flexible, and cost-effective SSD based Block Storage which can be attach to your Hetzner Cloud Server. At this point in time its available in the Nuremberg and Helsinki regions.
Resizing of Volumes
Volumes can be resized up to 10TB and the console allows you to resize in 1GB increments. You are allowed to increase, but cannot decrease.
Demo through Cloud Volumes
Let's run through a demo, where we will do the following:
- Provision a Server
- Provision a Volume (XFS Filesystem / EXT4 is also optional)
- Inspect the Volume, do some performance testing
- Resize the Volume via Hetzner Cloud Console
- Grow the XFS Filesystem
After provisioning a server, which takes less than a minute, you should see that the server is created:
SSH into your server. At this moment, we have not provisioned any volumes, so only the root partition should be mounted. Look at the block allocation:
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 19.1G 0 disk
--sda1 8:1 0 19.1G 0 part /
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
Have a look at the fstab:
cat /etc/fstab
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
UUID=2f54e8e6-ff9c-497a-88ea-ce159f6cd283 / ext4 discard,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
And have a look at the mounted disks layout:
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 959M 0 959M 0% /dev
tmpfs 195M 652K 194M 1% /run
/dev/sda1 19G 1.6G 17G 9% /
tmpfs 973M 0 973M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 973M 0 973M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 195M 0 195M 0% /run/user/0
Now, time to provision a Volume. Head over to the Volumes section:
I'm going ahead with creating a volume with 10GB of space and assign it to my server, and yeah that's right, 10GB of storage is 0,40 EUR per month, epic value for money!
After you volume is created, you should see similar output below:
Head back to your server, and have a look at the output when running the similar commands from earlier:
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 19.1G 0 disk
--sda1 8:1 0 19.1G 0 part /
sdb 8:16 0 10G 0 disk /mnt/HC_Volume_1497823
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
The fstab config:
$ cat /etc/fstab
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
UUID=2f54e8e6-ff9c-497a-88ea-ce159f6cd283 / ext4 discard,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0HC_Volume_1497823 /mnt/HC_Volume_1497823 xfs discard,nofail,defaults 0 0
The disk layout:
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 959M 0 959M 0% /dev
tmpfs 195M 660K 194M 1% /run
/dev/sda1 19G 1.6G 17G 9% /
tmpfs 973M 0 973M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 973M 0 973M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 195M 0 195M 0% /run/user/0
/dev/sdb 10G 43M 10G 1% /mnt/HC_Volume_1497823
We can see from the output above how easy it is to provision a volume to your Hetzner Cloud Server. And everything gets done for you, the disk is mounted and the /etc/fstab configuration is populated for you.
Time for some performance testing on the volume:
$ dd bs=2M count=256 if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/HC_Volume_1497823/test.dd
256+0 records in
256+0 records out
536870912 bytes (537 MB, 512 MiB) copied, 0.911306 s, 589 MB/s
Pretty neat right? :D
Let's resize the volume via the Hetzner Cloud Console to 20GB and resize the filesystem. From the Console, head over to the volumes section, select the more options and select resize:
After the volume has been resized, head back to your server and resize the filesystem. As we are using XFS Filesystem, we will use xfs_growfs :
$ xfs_growfs /dev/sdb
meta-data=/dev/sdb isize=512 agcount=4, agsize=655360 blks
= sectsz=512 attr=2, projid32bit=1
= crc=1 finobt=1 spinodes=0 rmapbt=0
= reflink=0
data = bsize=4096 blocks=2621440, imaxpct=25
= sunit=0 swidth=0 blks
naming =version 2 bsize=4096 ascii-ci=0 ftype=1
log =internal bsize=4096 blocks=2560, version=2
= sectsz=512 sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none extsz=4096 blocks=0, rtextents=0
data blocks changed from 2621440 to 5242880
Have a look at the disk layout and see that the filesystem was resized on the fly. If you have applications writing/reading to and from that volume, its better to unmount it first.
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 959M 0 959M 0% /dev
tmpfs 195M 660K 194M 1% /run
/dev/sda1 19G 2.1G 16G 12% /
tmpfs 973M 0 973M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 973M 0 973M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 195M 0 195M 0% /run/user/0
/dev/sdb 20G 565M 20G 3% /mnt/HC_Volume_1497823
I must admit, I am really stoked with Hetzner's offerings and their performance. I've been hosting servers with them for the past 5 months and so far they really impressed me.
Have a look at Hetzner Cloud's offerings, they have great prices as you can start off with a server from as little as 2.49 EUR per month, which gives you 1vCPU, 2GB of RAM, 20GB disk Space and 20TB of traffic. I mean, thats awesome value for money. They also offer Floating IP's, Backups, etc.
Resources:
Thank You
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