extend disk space in VMWare with no Volume groups

Question

I have CentOS7 installed as guest in VMWare Fusion. Need to increase the size of my disk. Following this guide. Got to step 3) Extend your Logical Volume with the new partition and created a physical volume. However my sudo vgdisplay shows the following:

[sudo] password for user:

i.e bupkis. Looks like I don't have any volume groups.

I tried doing sudo vgcreate vg1 /dev/sda3 /dev/sda4 but I got the following result:

[sudo] password for user: 

  Can't open /dev/sda3 exclusively.  Mounted filesystem?

I'm not very savvy in this area. Does anyone know how do I proceed? Would appreciate any help.

Here is the output of fdisk -l

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      616447      307200   83  Linux
/dev/sda2          616448     4810751     2097152   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3         4810752    41943039    18566144   83  Linux
/dev/sda4        41943040   104857599    31457280   8e  Linux LVM

Output of file -sL for each partition

[user@localhost ~]$ sudo file -sL /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1: SGI XFS filesystem data (blksz 4096, inosz 512, v2 dirs)
[user@localhost ~]$ sudo file -sL /dev/sda2
/dev/sda2: Linux/i386 swap file (new style), version 1 (4K pages), size 524287 pages, no label, UUID=<blacked-out>
[user@localhost ~]$ sudo file -sL /dev/sda3
/dev/sda3: SGI XFS filesystem data (blksz 4096, inosz 512, v2 dirs)
[user@localhost ~]$ sudo file -sL /dev/sda4
/dev/sda4: LVM2 PV (Linux Logical Volume Manager), UUID: <blacked-out>, size: 32212254720

EDIT

Output of df -hTP | grep -v tmpfs

Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3      xfs        18G   18G  257M  99% /
/dev/sda1      xfs       297M  204M   94M  69% /boot
.host:/        vmhgfs    233G  167G   66G  72% /mnt/hgfs

Output of lsblk

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0   50G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0  300M  0 part /boot
├─sda2   8:2    0    2G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sda3   8:3    0 17.7G  0 part /
└─sda4   8:4    0   30G  0 part 
sr0     11:0    1 1024M  0 rom  

Solution

If you want to make /dev/sda3 bigger, you have to delete or move /dev/sda4. The point that Mattias doesn't explicitly call out is his guide doesn't help you when your disk isn't already using LVM. You can't easily extend /dev/sda3 without risking destroying data. It can be done, but it is a bit more advanced.

Are you using /dev/sda4 at all? It appears to be an unused 30GB partition that you may have created and marked as LVM, but haven't configured yet.

The simplest way to make more space is to initialize LVM on /dev/sda4.

---

How to setup LVM on the unused partition

Warning: Make sure /dev/sda4 doesn't have any data you want to keep. These steps are destructive.

volgr0 is the arbitrary name I am using for the Volume Group.

logvol0 is the arbitrary name I am using for the Logical Volume.

1. Initialize /dev/sda4 as a Physical Volume pvcreate /dev/sda4
2. Create the Volume Group and allocate the PV from step 1 to it vgcreate volgr0 /dev/sda4
3. Create a logical volume on your new Volume Group lvcreate -L +20G -n logvol0 volgr0
4. Initialize (format) the logical volume mkfs.xfs /dev/volgr0/logvol0

You now have a 10GB logical volume that can be used just like a regular disk partition (e.g. /dev/hda3, /dev/vda2, etc.) It's device mapper path is probably /dev/mapper/volgr0-logvol0 or you can use the symlinks /dev/volgr0/lgvol0 (depends on your exact OS and configuration, but this is pretty typical for Fedora/Cent/RHEL/SciLinux)

Now it's just a matter of mounting a folder in the current filesystem on this volume and using it, e.g. mount /dev/volgr0/logvol0 /opt. This would mount the /opt directory onto your lvol0.

---

How to extend the size of a regular partition

Warning: Make sure /dev/sda4 doesn't have any data you want to keep. These steps are destructive. It's a good idea to have a backup of the whole .vmdk in fact.

1. Reboot your VM using a Live OS image. I prefer System Rescue CD myself for this sort of thing, but there are plenty of other good options.
2. Using fdisk, delete /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda4
3. Using fdisk, create a new partition #3 (it will be /dev/sda3) using all of the available disk space (accept the defaults fdisk offers)
4. Reboot your VM with the local OS
5. Resize your /dev/sda3 filesystem xfs_growfs /dev/sda3 (Mattias blogged about this)

Voila!

Yes, deleting a partition with fdisk from the rescue image is scary...but in this case, all you are doing is deleting the entries in the partition table itself, not the actual partitions.

So, at the end of it all is a lesson I like to repeat often: when in doubt, go ahead and use LVM.

Comments

[Jeff Schaller]

did you enter the user's password?

[Alxs]

/dev/sda3 is a mounted Linux filesystem. You can't change its type to LVM without destroying the data on it. Is that what you're trying to do?

[0xSheepdog]

Please provide the output from the following two commands: df -hTP | grep -v tmpfs and lsblk

[Nils]

Do want to extend sda3? No need for an additional partition or LVM in that case.

[flashburn]

@Nils How do I extend it then without additional partition?

[flashburn]

@Alxs I'm trying to extend /dev/sda3.

[flashburn]

@0xSheepdog command output is provided at the end of the post.

[0xSheepdog]

I will update answer with how to move files to decrease use in /dev/sda3 if you know where all your space is being eaten up (music files, ISOs, videos, etc.)

[Nils]

I added an answer.