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Your customer want you to add a new volume in one of the VM SLES server but can not affort down time? No worry, you can do that easily with ESX.

Below is step by step guide with screen captured from the VM (my test machine is running on SLES10 SP2):

Tip: It is best to do a snapshot before you start this task, incase anything goes wrong.

1) This is my test VM machine. It is having one disk at beginning.

2) I am adding a 2GB volume into the VM. Click OK to continue.

3) Rescan to detect the new volume just added in VM Properties Screen.

Tip: Run following as root.

In this screen I actually run following commands:

a)# cat /proc/partitions

This will show the current volume in the server, which is the first portion in the screen capture. What we have on the server is only /dev/sda.

b)# rescan-scsi-bus.sh

This command will do a scan for all the /dev/sdx you have on the server. The new volume that we just add will get detected and show as /dev/sdb in my case.

c)# cat /proc/partitions

This is just to show the volume on the server again to confirm I got the new volume detected.

4) run fdisk to create the new Linux volume.

5.1) Format the volume into EXT3 File System.

Or you are using reiserfs? Please refer to following screen capture:

5.2) Format the volume into ReiserFS.

6) modify /etc/fstab to make sure the server will boot up with the new volume.

Modify /etc/fstab by adding a line which point /dev/sdb1 (the new volume) to moint into /sles (your mount point). The screen capture is for ReiserFS. If you are using EXT3, you may replace the “reiserfs” to “ext3” in the same line.

And, your job is done. No reboot required. Have fun.