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AWS EC2: Increase volume and file system size

278 words·
AWS EC2
Table of Contents

Recently I ran out of storage on a AWS cloud-based virtual machine. In this guide I show a quick overfiew of the process of enlarging an AWS EC2 volume and file system. The terminology depends wheter the architecture is Xen or Nitro based, this tutorial is for Xen based architecture.

Part 1: AWS Web Interface
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To following steps can be done while the EC2 instance is running, but it’s only possible with EBS (gp2) volumes.

  • Go to Instance / Storage
  • Select Volume
  • Select “Modify Volume”
  • Increase Volume Size

Wait till “Volume Status” jumps from modifying state to optimizing or completed and go ahead with Part 2.

Part 2: SSH into the EC2 instance
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Use the lsblk command to find the name of the partition. The output should look as follows:

NAME     MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
xvda     202:0    0     8G  0 disk
├─xvda1  202:1    0   7.9G  0 part /

Choose the partition the should be extended and use the growpartcommand to do so:
sudo growpart /dev/xvda 1 Extend the partition with growpart
lsblk Check the new size of the partition

Use the df -hT command to list name and mount point for the file system that needs to be extend and extend the file system with resizefs.
df -hT List name, size, type and mount point for the file system
sudo resize2fs /dev/xvda1 Extend the mounted file system named /dev/xvda1

Disk without partition
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When the disk has no partition, you can skip the growpart command and just check the new disk size with the following command fdisk -l /dev/<disk_name>, for example: fdisk -l /dev/xvdb.

After that you can increase the file system resize2fs /dev/xvdb.