Storage Expansion Help: Adding Volume to Running Enhance Instance

aymanaaoun

Hi everyone,

I'm running Enhance on a Digital Ocean droplet and need some guidance on the safest way to expand storage. Here's my current situation:

Current Setup:

Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS
Root partition (/dev/vda1): 160GB total, 141GB used (91% full)
Have a new 100GB volume attached but not yet integrated
/var/www is on the root partition and running out of space

My Requirements:

Need to expand storage for /var/www
Prefer minimal to no downtime
Have backups in place
Service is currently running in production

Technical Details:

df -h /var/www
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1       155G  141G   15G  91% /

I've already attached a 100GB volume through Digital Ocean's dashboard, but I need advice on the best way to integrate it with my running Enhance instance.

What's the recommended approach for expanding storage on a running Enhance instance?

Any guidance or experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Rich

I wouldn't suggest this was a good idea. Adding extra volume storage is known as a block device. It's effectively network storage. It's great for creating new partitions but not for trying to expand your root partition via LVM. You'd of been better scaling to a larger VPS and then resizing both the root partition and the filesystem. That said I don't think DO lets you do that. Usually when you scale it keeps the volume the same as it's highly suspectable to being messed up if the commands aren't issued right.

You might be able to take a snapshot and then rebuild into a larger offering. Again it's possibly dicey. Do tougher research. I've not used DO in awhile now.

Since this leaves you in a bit of bind I would imagine, I recommend using a separate VPS adding it to your cluster and moving some sites off from it. That is effectively the point of enhance, it's to use more severs not more /home directories. (as cpanel etc.. would do)

hwcltjn

Rich is right, Enhance is so flexible, it's just easier to provision a larger sever and move your sites to it instead.

microvax

I found this post while looking for ideas on how to mount a block storage device on a VPS.
So I was wondering whether it’s feasible to do this on a Linux server or VPS before installing Enhance as a control panel.

Adam

microvax

Yes it is. Mount the storage at /var/www if you want to use it for website data. It will usually be slower than a local disk.

nhybgtvfr

i assume the new volume is already formatted..

mount it to eg /mnt/storage
rsync -a /var/www/ /mnt/storage/
do this a couple of times until the sync time is as short as possible.
set the new volume to be mounted at /var/www in /etc/fstab, but do not actually mount it there yet.
stop the webserver service, eg systemctl stop apache2
stop any other services that might write to /var/www or might restart the webserver service.
do a final resync,
unmount /mnt/storage and remount it to /var/www and restart the stopped services.
(or just reboot)

at some point, once you're confident this all worked without problems, you will probably want to stop any service that writes to /var/www again, unmount the new volume, then delete everything in the original /var/www on the root partition to free up that disk space, then remount the new volume and restart the stopped services

Adam

If you're doing it on an existing server you should also stop appcd and kill all php processes before re-mounting anything.

systemctl stop appcd
killall -9 lsphp php-fpm appinit
(re-mount the storage)
systemctl start appcd