zimbra os disk --> almost full

[Sam159]

Hi,

I have one disk that contains ubuntu os and zimbra installation

other disk is storage (mails)

Now I see that every day my os disk gets more full (90%, 94%,...)

How can that? All my mails are stored on the other disk? So are there temp files that I can clean?

second question:

I made in Citrix Xenserver my os disk bigger... But how can I make the partition where my OS is installed bigger? (/dev/xvda1 )

[Sam159]

/opt/zimbra/log --> a lot of logfiles from months ago...

I deleted the biggest files and now everything is back normal..

[Alupis]

yikes! if this is a production server... I would recommend archiving those logs off the server (to external hard drive or something) instead of deleting them!

And besides... you have not solved your problem... but merely averted it temporarily. if a log file is causing you to be out of space... then it will happen again, and again... and again... etc.

Be careful when expanding and shrinking volumes... it can have unexpected... horrific consequences! (spoken from someone who knows! ;-P )...

Anyways... just because you expand the disk does not mean the OS is aware of this new space... due to how the partition is laid out...you need to tell the partition that there is extra space available.. and that its all clear to move in and put it's feet up on the table and such...

So.. first make sure you have a backup of anything critical. In Xenserver (my favorite virtual platform btw... good choice!). -- you can do a snapshot of the VM... or if your paranoia level is high, you can export the VM to a file (and download to your computer). Of course that depends on how big the VM's virtual hard drives are... but is a great idea if you can afford the downtime (could take 10 minutes to an hour depending on your network speed, and size of virtual hard drive).

And based on the fact you have not done this before... i would download PartedMagic (free live cd bootable linux environment meant specifically for resizing partitions and fixing hard drive problems...). Download this at: downloads (btw, donate to this dude if you can... he has an awesome project and he releases it for free). PartedMagic makes partition resizing just about foolproof... nice!

Then follow these directions (they use NTFS in the examples, but the process should be very similar... if not the same). using_gparted

Good luck... and MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP!

[Sam159]

I don't know why I have all those log files from MONTHS ago... So it's no problem to delete them. I leave the last month on server..

I know how we can take snapshots and so, we have full backupsystem of xenserver so that is no problem.

Thnx

[Alupis]

just remember that snapshots are not a backup! when you snapshot, the xenserver creates a new virtual hard drive and starts appending any read/write changes to that new virtual device instead of the original... when you delete a snapshot, it "commits" these changes back to the original virtual hard drive file by merging them together... the vm itself only sees the most recent "snapshot" virtual device and basically reads it like one giant drive. Each of these snapshots has their own overhead in disk space, etc that it creates every time you snapshot. If you go to your XenCenter console and view the Storage for any particular VM that has a snapshot, you will see the virtual allocation is much larger than the actual disk allocation.

A few years ago the shop I was with got into a lot of trouble by mis-understanding snapshotting and what it meant. We had made an automatic script to snapshot two vm's nightly. we did this for a few months, and then suddenly ran out of space on the server (we had poor monitoring as well... but thats a different story...). When we went delete the snapshots, the space it needed grew since it writes the changes into the original before it removes the snapshot file (in case it fails and has to revert). So basically we maxed out the storage and the server crashed, and corrupted both vm's. :-(

That was a fun weekend scramble to rebuild everything from scratch before opening on monday....