Hi there,
We are currently in the situation where two of our servers are soon running out of disk-space.
To fix this, we've decided to simply replace the current disks with bigger ones.
What is the best way to go about replacing them, and having as little downtime as possible? We take daily backups using rdiff-backup, so we have everything we need to restore all data, but it requires a fresh basic reinstall of the OS first.
Since the new disks will be bigger, the partitions will naturally also be bigger, so I suppose I cannot simply take a dd-image of the entire drive and still make good use of the new disk-space.
Is it possible to take a dd-image of each partition, and write these images back to the server after doing initial partitioning (from a bootcd), or will the dd-images be "locked" to a certain size? The filesystem will most certainly be smaller, but from what I can understand, expanding an ext3-filesystem is trivial.
One of the servers are running LVM, the other is not. Is it possible to move the "not"-server onto LVM during initial partitioning, and before I write back my dd-images?
Thanks for any pointers or advice!
We are currently in the situation where two of our servers are soon running out of disk-space.
To fix this, we've decided to simply replace the current disks with bigger ones.
What is the best way to go about replacing them, and having as little downtime as possible? We take daily backups using rdiff-backup, so we have everything we need to restore all data, but it requires a fresh basic reinstall of the OS first.
Since the new disks will be bigger, the partitions will naturally also be bigger, so I suppose I cannot simply take a dd-image of the entire drive and still make good use of the new disk-space.
Is it possible to take a dd-image of each partition, and write these images back to the server after doing initial partitioning (from a bootcd), or will the dd-images be "locked" to a certain size? The filesystem will most certainly be smaller, but from what I can understand, expanding an ext3-filesystem is trivial.
One of the servers are running LVM, the other is not. Is it possible to move the "not"-server onto LVM during initial partitioning, and before I write back my dd-images?
Thanks for any pointers or advice!