Expanding An EBS Root Volume

I’m prepping to install Kubernetes on an EC2 instance I’m using for FoundryVTT and a ProjectZomboid multiplayer server. First thing I wanted to do was increase the size of the File System. Nothing worse than running out of space when you just want everything to work. There are a few words used that are easy to confuse so to clarify, when I refer to the volume I mean the actual EBS storage. The partition is what must be manually allocated for use and then finally formatted with a file system. So in this case we need to increase the size of the volume, extend the partition, and extend the file system in that order.

Create a Snapshot

List volumes:

aws ec2 describe-volumes

Create snapshot:

aws ec2 create-snapshot --description "Expanding EBS Volume" --volume-id <value>

Expand the Volume

Expand volume specifying size in GBs:

aws ec2 modify-volume --volume-id <value> --size <value>

Monitor progress, can proceed after entering optimizing state:

aws ec2 describe-volumes-modifications --volume-ids <value>

Extend Partition

Identify the filesystem, for Amazon Linux/RHEL listed under ‘type’ column:

df -Ht

Locate the name of the partition to be extended with lsblk command:

[ec2-user ~]$ lsblk
NAME          MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
nvme1n1       259:0    0  30G  0 disk /data
nvme0n1       259:1    0  16G  0 disk
└─nvme0n1p1   259:2    0   8G  0 part /
└─nvme0n1p128 259:3    0   1M  0 part

Note that the “partition number” is appended to the device (NAME column in example). Don’t use the high number. Extend the partition:

sudo growpart <partition> <partition number>
# example
sudo growpart /dev/xvda 1

Verify new partition size with lsblk

Extend File System

XFS:

sudo xfs_growfs -d <mount point e.g. />

ext4:

sudo resize2fs /dev/<partition>

Reference