Expanding a drive that is using ZFS

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Linux hosts.
Post Reply
Andrew@USOP
Posts: 18
Joined: 6. Aug 2020, 17:22

Expanding a drive that is using ZFS

Post by Andrew@USOP »

The guest is Ubuntu 21.10 on a ZFS setup drive.
The host is Windows 10

The initial setup was for a dynamically allocated VDI set at 100G
It turns out that the system running there is popular, but needs much more drive space (500G).

I can resize the VDI happily enough, but am at a loss on how to convince ZFS to fill out the now available free space.
scottgus1
Site Moderator
Posts: 20965
Joined: 30. Dec 2009, 20:14
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Windows, Linux

Re: Expanding a drive that is using ZFS

Post by scottgus1 »

As shown in How to Resize a Drive, the resize is a two-step process:
1. Increase the drive file size.
2. Increase the partition in the VM's OS.

Virtualbox only handles #1. The VM's OS has to handle #2. So you'll have to hunt up how to expand a ZFS partition through a web-search or Ubuntu/ZFS help forum.
mpack
Site Moderator
Posts: 39156
Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Mostly XP

Re: Expanding a drive that is using ZFS

Post by mpack »

I don't know much about ZFS, but I believe that expanding a partition might be an alien concept. I believe ZFS is one of those filesystems that works with storage pools, so you would increase the drive capacity, then turn the new capacity into a new storage element and add it to a pool.

I avoid such filesystems. A pool of storage elements sounds to me very much like one basket contains all my eggs. RAID support only partly compensates for my misgivings.
Post Reply