Exadata: increase the size of /EXAVMIMAGES

In the Exadata virtual configuration world, the disk space available for the VMs for installating the systems, having applicative FS, etc... is located in on the hypervisor in /EXAVIMAGES which looks like this on a default X8M installation:

[root@kvmhost01 ~]# df -h /EXAVMIMAGES/
Filesystem                           Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VGExaDb-LVDbExaVMImages  1.5T  443G  1.1T  30% /EXAVMIMAGES
[root@kvmhost01 ~]#

This one is default sized but some VMs are already created thus the disk space already used. Point is that there is "only" 1.1TB left and I often get the question "it is not much for more VMs, more ORACLE_HOMEs and we need tons of space for the logs !". Not sure why people need so much space for [ORACLE|GRID]_HOMEs which are around 12 GB in size but... anyway, let's address the client's fear not to underestimate the psychologic aspect of our job :) and allocate disk space before increasing VM filesystems.

We can see below that there is much more space not allocated but ready to be allocated on top of this free space:

[root@kvmhost01 ]# pvs
  PV         VG      Fmt  Attr PSize PFree
  /dev/sda3  VGExaDb lvm2 a--  3.27t 1.73t    <== 1.73 TB available
[root@kvmhost01 ]#

So here there is 1.73 TB available on top of the already allocated and free 1.1 TB (and again this specific KVM host has already 5 VMs running) so there is plenty of disk space available to install many [ORACLE|GRID]_HOMEs and store months of logfiles !

Below for example how to resize /EXAVIMAGES to let's say using 90% of what is available:

[root@kvmhost01 ]# lvextend -l +90%FREE /dev/VGExaDb/LVDbExaVMImages
[root@kvmhost01 ]# xfs_growfs /EXAVMIMAGES

Easy and 100% online ! plenty of space to free to use !