Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) How to 'growfs' an UFS on Top of a SVM mirror/concat/raid5/soft partition by Adding a New LUN (Doc ID 2018654.1)

Last updated on MAY 22, 2023

Applies to:

Sun Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) - Version 11.9.0 and later
Solaris Cluster - Version 3.0 and later
Oracle Solaris on SPARC (32-bit)
Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit)
Oracle Solaris on x86-64 (64-bit)
Oracle Solaris on x86 (32-bit)

Goal

Solstice Disk Suite (SDS) and Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) have traditionally allowed you to increase the amount of available space on mirror/concat/raid 5 and soft partition.
The aim of this document is to provide you with practical examples on how to achieve the goal of increasing the file system (fs) size by adding new LUNs for any of the possible configurations and running growfs (1M).

Before increasing the fs size, you will need to increase the metadevive underlying layer by adding new free space on it.
With this document free space will be added by adding new LUNs to the actual config.
Such a change can be achieved online without umounting the fs.

The following are different metadevices type you may deal with:

A) mirror
B) concat (concatination)
C) stripe
D) raid 5
E) soft partition

For expanding fs on an existing LUN refer to:
<Document 2018655.1> Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) How to 'growfs' an UFS on Top of a SVM mirror/concat/soft partition by Expanding an Exiting LUN

It is always recommended to have a valid backup of the filesystem available before making such kind of changes.

Reference the growfs(1M) man page which includes:

growfs will ''write-lock'' (see lockfs(1M)) a mounted file
system when expanding. The length of time the file system is
write-locked can be shortened by expanding the file system
in stages. For instance, to expand a 1 Gbyte file system to
2 Gbytes, the file system can be grown in 16 Mbyte stages
using the -s option to specify the total size of the new
file system at each stage. The argument for -s is the number
of sectors, and must be a multiple of the cylinder size.
Note: The file system cannot be grown if a cylinder size of
less than 2 is specified. Refer to the newfs(1M) man page
for information on the options available when growing a file
system.

growfs displays the same information as mkfs during the
expansion of the file system.

If growfs is aborted, recover any lost free space by
unmounting the file system and running the fsck command, or
run the growfs command again.

Note: If growfs is aborted and the file system is used
before fsck is run on it, UFS metadata might be left in an
incomplete state, with the result that the file system would
be corrupted. In such a circumstance, you would have to
restore the file system from backups.

The time to grow a filesystem is typically very short.