due on Wednesday April 13th before 10pm PT
Assignment #3 – Configuring Storage Devices Description In this assignment, you will learn how to use your hypervisor software to add new disk drives and expand new ones. You will then learn how to create new drives and expand existing drives from Windows and Linux servers. The deliverables of this project will be a Microsoft Word document with screenshots of the process of adding and expanding disks in your hypervisor, Windows Server and Linux server. Additionally, there will be a series of questions throughout this assignment that should be answered in your Word document. This is an individual assignment. All work should be independent. Requirements The following sections will take you through the process of adding and expanding drives, first in the hypervisor, then Windows and Linux. Hypervisor The exact steps here depend on what you chose to use as your hypervisor (these steps are for VMware Workstation Pro) and you may need to search online for assistance with managing disk based on what product you are using. However, while most hypervisors allow expanding of drives and adding drives while the server is running, go ahead and start with all of your virtual machines powered off. · For both of your virtual machines, edit the settings of the VM and add a new disk object. This new disk should be thin provisioned and 10 GB in size. In VMware Workstation Pro, go into settings for the VM, then add a new hard drive. You will need to create a new virtual hard disk with similar settings to the one added when you created the VM itself with a size of 10GB. Make sure you use thin provisioning. · The next step is adding capacity to the existing main hard drive. Most hypervisors do not allow for the expansion of disks when there are snapshots present, so you will need to remove any that currently exist. In VMware Workstation, go into settings for the VM and select the main hard disk (40GB drive), then click on “Expand”. This will show you the current size and then you can set the new maximum. Make the new maximum size 50GB. Do this for both of your virtual machines. Windows Windows provides several ways to add and expand disks. This process will focus on Disk Manager and PowerShell. · The first thing you should do is use PowerShell to initialize and create a partition on the newly created disk resource. To launch PowerShell, click on the Start menu, type “PowerShell” and right click on “Windows PowerShell” and click on “Run as Administrator”. · List disks – use the “get-disk” cmdlet to list the disks in your system. There should be two, Disk 0 should be your 50GB (since you expanded it from 40GB) boot drive and Disk 1 should be your newly created 10GB disk. · Initialize disk – The first thing you need to do is initialize a newly created disk. To do that, type “initialize-disk 1”. To verify that it worked, run “get-disk” again. · SCREENSHOT (should include the output from all three PowerShell commands above. · QUESTIONS: · What is the partition style of the boot disk (disk 0)? What was the partition style before the new disk was initialized? What is the partition style of the new disk after it was initialized? · The “RAW” type simply means that the disk has not yet been initialized. In about 1-2 paragraphs, describe the difference between the GPT and MBR partition styles. Include differences in size limits, which one is more modern, and why you would used one over the other. · Create a new partition – First, let’s verify that Disk 1 has no existing partitions by running “get-partition -DiskNumber 1”. You may see a 16 or 32MB reserved partition, and that is OK. That is created when you create a GPT volume with a UFEI bios. Now, create a 5GB partition by running “new-partition -DiskNumber 1 -DriveLetter e -Size 5GB”. Run the get-partition command again to verify it was created. · SCREENSHOT (should show all three commands from above) · Format the disk – Once the partition has been created, you need to format it with a file system before it can be used. To do that, you can use the format-volume cmdlet by running “format-volume -DriveLetter e” · Resizing the disk – To resize the disk to the maximum size is a two part process. The first command will create a variable $MaxSize and populate it with the maximum supported size for the “e:\” drive. The second will resize the partition to the maximum size using that value. The third just shows the results of the resizing. The commands need to be run on separate lines: · $MaxSize = (Get-PartitionSupportedSize -DriveLetter e).sizeMax · Resize-Partition -DriveLetter e -Size $MaxSize · Get-Partition -DiskNumber 1 · SCREENSHOT (should show the output of the commands for resizing the drive) · For the next task, we will use Disk Management to expand the “c:\” drive. The first step is to open Server Manager if it isn’t already opened, click on “Computer Management,” then find and select “Disk Management” in the list on the left. · SCREENSHOT (showing the disk layout in Disk Management before extending the “c:\” drive, but after creating/formatting/extending the “e:\” drive) · If your “Recovery Partition” is between your “C:” drive partition and your “Unallocated” space at the end of the disk, you will need to perform the following steps: · From the administrator command prompt, run “diskpart”. · In diskpart, type “list disk” and make note of the Disk # for the 50 GB disk · Type “select disk 0” (assuming your 50GB disk is disk 0 · Type “list partition” and make note of the Partition # for the partition that is of type “Recovery” · Type “select partition 4” (assuming your Recovery partition is partition 4) · Type “delete partition override” · To expand the drive, right click on the partition labeled “(C)” and select “Extend Volume”. When prompted to “Select Disks”, verify that the only listed free space in the “Selected” space is the extra capacity from Disk 0 and that you are using the maximum amount. Then hit next and finish. · SCREENSHOT (Showing the disk layout in Disk Management after extending the “c:\” drive) Linux Linux LVM simplifies the process of adding and expanding disks on Linux systems. Since Ubuntu deploys the root volume (/) as LVM, we will focus on using LVM for extending and adding new storage devices. · For the exercise in Linux, we will start with extending the root file system. To make this section easier, though it is not a good idea in practice due to security concerns, we will start by switching to root. In Ubuntu, you do that by running “sudo su -“. You should now see the “root@
:~#” prompt. Keep your console running as root for the remainder of this section. If you choose to not run as root, you can just add “sudo “ in front of each command. · Run “fdisk -l /dev/sda” to verify that the disk is listed as being 50GB and there is one partition contained on the disk that is about 40GB. Make not of the device that is about 40GB. · The next step is to extend the partition. This process is safe for a test computer, but it would be safer to be done offline using a live CD. The high-level steps involved are to delete the existing partition, create a new larger partition, rescan the partitions, then resize the LVM PV and LV, and finish with extending the file system. · Recreating the partition – The fdisk tool runs in an interactive mode when you type “fdisk /dev/sda”. From there, you can display the partition table by typing “p”. In the partition listing, you will see that there are three partitions. You will want to delete the ~40GB partition (It might be slightly less such as 39GB). To delete the partition, type “d”, and then type the number of the ~40GB partition and hit enter (it should be 3). Then, create a new partition by typing “n”, hit return, type the new partition number (should be 3) and hit enter. Take the defaults for the start and end sectors by just hitting enter to accept the defaults. If asked if you want to remove the LVM signature, say NO. This creates a standard Linux partition, but we need an LVM partition, so while still in fdisk, type “t” to change the type, and choose the partition we just created (should be 3). Then type “L” to list the partition types and look for the one labeled “Linux LVM” and use the numeric code to the left. When you find it, press “q” to exit the list mode. The code for a Linux LVM partition is 31 so for partition type, enter 31 and hit enter. Type “p” to display the partition table and verify that the partition is 50GB and that the type is Linux LVM. If everything is correct, type “w” to write the information and quit. The final step in this process is to run “partx -u /dev/sda” to tell the kernel to use the new size for the partition. There is no output for this command. · SCREENSHOT (should include the output from the “p” command while still in fdisk and the partx command) · LVM Resizing – You will need to resize the PV and the LV in before you can use the added space. First, you want to display the PV by running “pvdisplay” and you will see that the physical volume is still only 40GB. Make note of the PV Name, it should be /dev/sda3. Then you can run “pvresize /dev/sda3” to resize the PV. Run “pvdisplay” again to verify everything worked OK. · SCREENSHOT (showing the pvdisplay and the pvresize commands) The next step is similar for resizing the logical volume. First run “lvdisplay” to display the volume info and make note of the LV Path. Then run “lvextend -l +100%FREE ”, replacing with what you noted in the output from lvdisplay. Once that is done, run “lvdisplay” again to verify the results. · SCREENSHOT (showing the lvdisplay and the lvresize commands) · Resizing the file system – The final step is to actually resize the file system. Before you begin, run “df -h” to display the free space on all of your storage devices. Then resize the file system by running “resize2fs ”. Run “df -h” again to confirm that everything worked as expected. · SCREENSHOT (showing the df and resize2fs commands) · The next thing we are