Resize EBS Volume Without Rebooting

In this blog post , We will learn to resize EBS volume without rebooting EC2 instances.

What Is EBS Volume?

Amazon EBS volume is a durable, block-level storage device that you can attach to a single EC2 instance.

It is a block storage system which is used to store persistent data.

Amazon EBS – Volume Types:

• General Purpose SSD
• Provisioned IOPS SSD
• Throughput Optimized HDD
• Magnetic

This article guides you to resize the EBS volume size without rebooting the EC2 Instance.

Modifying Volume Size Using AWS Console:

Login to EC2 management Console,

EC2 CONSOLE

Choose Instances in the last pane

Select the instance for which you want to resize the Volume.

Under Description , You should see the Root device attached with the EC2 instance.

If you click the volume , You should see the following pop up,

Select the EBS volume ID , It will take you to Volumes page.

Under Actions , click Modify,

Change the size of the volume, It should be above 200GB and Click Modify.

Important Note: EBS Volume once increased, It cannot be reduced.

Resizing The Partition:

Now login to the EC2 instance for which we have modified the Volume size.

Now list the block devices attached with this instance using the below command.

root@TEST:~# lsblk 
NAME    MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop1     7:1    0 89.1M  1 loop /snap/core/8268
loop2     7:2    0  240K  1 loop /snap/jq/6
loop3     7:3    0 89.1M  1 loop /snap/core/8213
xvda    202:0    0  250G  0 disk 
└─xvda1 202:1    0  200G  0 part /

You can see that, I have change my volume size from 200 to 250 But still its 200 GB, Lets go ahead and change it.

Installing The Tool:

We have to install a package named cloud-guest-utils which will help us to resize the volume.

Install the package using the below command,

apt-get install cloud-guest-utils

Once the package is installed.

Extend The Partition Using Growpart:

growpart is used to extent the patition in the partition table if any free spaces are available.

Run the below command,

growpart /dev/xvda 1

You should see the following output:

CHANGED: partition=1 start=2048 old: size=419428319 end=419430367 new: size=524285919,end=524287967

To Extend The File System , Run The Below Command.

xfs_growfs -d /

Let’s Check The Partition Size:

root@TEST:/home/rahulk# lsblk 
NAME    MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop1     7:1    0 89.1M  1 loop /snap/core/8268
loop2     7:2    0  240K  1 loop /snap/jq/6
loop3     7:3    0 89.1M  1 loop /snap/core/8213
xvda    202:0    0  250G  0 disk 
└─xvda1 202:1    0  250G  0 part /

Now you can see that the /dev/xvda1 partition is increased from 200 GB to 250 GB without Rebooting the Instance with Zero Downtime.

Thanks for reading this article.

Please do checkout my other articles.