Volume and Disk Space Expansion Using the growfs Command

Solaris Volume Manager enables you to expand a volume by adding additional slices. You can use either the Enhanced Storage tool within the Solaris Management Console or the command-line interface to add a slice to an existing volume.

You can expand a mounted or unmounted UFS file system that is contained within a volume without having to halt or back up your system. Nevertheless, backing up your data is always a good idea. After you expand the volume, use the growfs command to grow the file system.

After a file system has been expanded, the file system cannot be reduced in size. The inability to reduce the size of a file system is a UFS limitation. Similarly, after a Solaris Volume Manager partition has been increased in size, it cannot be reduced.

Applications and databases that use the raw volume must have their own method to “grow” the added space so that applications can recognize it. Solaris Volume Manager does not provide this capability.

You can expand the disk space in volumes in the following ways:

• Adding one or more slices to a RAID-0 volume

• Adding one or more slices to all submirrors of a RAID-1 volume

• Adding one or more slices to a RAID-5 volume

• Expanding a soft partition with additional space from the underlying component

The growfs command expands a UFS file system without loss of service or data. However, write access to the volume is suspended while the growfs command is running. You can expand the file system to the size of the slice or the volume that contains the file system.

The file system can be expanded to use only part of the additional disk space by using the -s size option to the growfs command.

When you expand a mirror, space is added to the mirror's underlying submirrors. The growfs command is then run on the RAID-1 volume. The general rule is that space is added to the underlying devices, and the growfs command is run on the top-level device.