Over the last two days I’ve had the interesting task of online some VMs from clones and increasing their disk space to accommodate a mass of user uploaded content. I’ve done this before but never actually with an Logical Volume Management (LVM) disk.

My first approach, like a fool, was to clone the VM from source and boot it from a remotely mounted GParted ISO, this didn’t actually go as expected and I was unable to add it to the LVM, I found a nice guide online and consulted a colleague because I knew he’d done something similar recently. After the first successful size increase I realised I was able to do it without ever rebooting the machine itself, this is accomplished by actually adding an extra disk to the VM, this disk can then be partition with cfdisk and then added to the LVM, thus …