Resizing Block Volumes (OCI)

In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, block volumes can be resized to increase storage capacity without recreating the volume or losing data.

This feature allows you to:

• Expand storage as your data grows

• Avoid downtime in most cases

• Dynamically scale your infrastructure

👉 After resizing the block volume in OCI, you must also extend the partition/LVM and file system at the OS level to use the additional space.

Steps to Resize Block Volumes

1.Increase size via console(Resize Block Volume to 60GB in OCI Console)

The block volume size was first updated to 60GB from the OCI Console. This confirms that the additional storage has been successfully allocated.

Note: At this stage, the increased size is visible in the console but is not yet usable inside the instance.

When you click on copy then copy the both rescan command in your notepad because we will use it later.

2. Extend and Utilize the Updated Storage from the Instance (PuTTY / LVM)

Although the volume shows 60GB in the console, it is not usable until the partition, LVM, and filesystem are extended from the instance. These steps were performed using PuTTY.

Increase the size of Disk

Next, we will use a rescan command that needs to be run in PuTTY to increase the size of the block volume.

Before running this command, we will check the size of block volume

lsblk

To check the current size of the specific disk we want to increase

lsblk -ap /dev/sdb | head -2

Now, Edit the copied rescan command (that you have copied from the OCI console) according to the current requirement (i.e., which disk we want to upgrade ex. /dev/sdb because sdb is the disk here)

sudo dd iflag=direct if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null count=1

echo "1" | sudo tee /sys/class/block/sdb/device/rescan

and then run lsblk command to check disk size is increased or not

lsblk

lsblk -ap /dev/sdb | head -2

To Verify whether the partition exists

sudo parted /dev/sdb print

Increase the partition to new size

sudo growpart /dev/sdb 1

Again run the partition command and check the size of part

sudo parted /dev/sdb print

Now size of the partition is increased

Run lsblk command and check size of disk and partition

lsblk

As we can see, the size has increased

Now, run the command to display detailed information about a specific logical volume (lv_u01) in a volume group (vg_u01)

sudo su - root

lvdisplay -am /dev/mapper/vg_u01-lv_u01

The logical volume is still the same as before; it has not increased yet

next, we Resize the Physical Volume

pvresize /dev/sdb1

pvdisplay /dev/sdb1

Physical volume still display the old volume in allocated PE

we can check volume group allocated PE also

vgdisplay vg_u01

As we can see below, Logical volume is still not increased

df -h

lsblk

Now, we Extend the Logical volume

lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/mapper/vg_u01-lv_u01

Logical volume is increased now

lsblk

But df –h still shows the old value

df -h

The last step is to resize the file system to extended 10 gb with right file format

resize2fs /dev/mapper/vg_u01-lv_u01

Finally, as shown in the screen below, running df -h confirms that the logical volume has been extended to the required size