Editing a Volume's Settings

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Block Volume service enables you to edit the following settings for block volumes and boot volumes:

Expand the volume size.
Change the volume performance.
Enable performance auto-tune.
Assigning a volume backup policy.

You can edit these settings when volumes are online and attached to instances or while they’re detached from instances. See the applicable sections in this topic for links to tasks describing the steps to edit these settings, along with additional information about working with these settings.

Required IAM Policy

To use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you must be granted security access in a policy by an administrator. This access is required whether you're using the Console or the REST API with an SDK, CLI, or other tool. If you get a message that you don’t have permission or are unauthorized, verify with your administrator what type of access you have and which compartment to work in.

For administrators: The policy in Let users launch compute instances includes the ability to attach/detach existing block volumes. The policy in Let volume admins manage block volumes, backups, and volume groups lets the specified group do everything with block volumes and backups, but not launch instances.

If you're new to policies, see Getting Started with Policies and Common Policies. For reference material about writing policies for instances, cloud networks, or other Core Services API resources, see Details for the Core Services.

Resizing Volumes

The Block Volume service's online resizing feature enables you to expand the size of an existing volume in place. After you resize an online volume, you need to rescan the disk and extend the partition. For more information, see:

Changing the Volume Performance

The elastic performance feature of the Block Volume service allows you to dynamically change the volume performance, see Block Volume Performance for more information. You can change volume performance for your block volumes and boot volumes while they are online, without any downtime, see Changing the Performance of a Volume. For specific information about this task in the Console, see Using the Console.

Enabling Performance Auto-tune for a Volume

With the performance auto-tune feature of the Block Volume service, you can configure your volumes to optimize cost with performance. When auto-tune is enabled, a volume’s performance it automatically adjusted to the lower cost option when the volume is detached from all instances. The performance is then automatically reset to the default performance option when you reattach the volume to an instance. For details, see Dynamic Performance Scaling.

Assigning a Backup Policy to a Volume

The Block Volume service provides you with the capability to perform volume backups automatically on a schedule and retain them based on the selected backup policy.

There are two kinds of backup policies:

User defined: Custom backup policies that you create and configure schedules for. With user defined policies, you can also enable scheduled cross-region backups, so that scheduled volume backups are automatically copied to a second region, see Scheduling Volume Backup Copies Across Regions.
Oracle defined: Predefined backup policies that have a set backup frequency and retention period. You cannot modify these policies.

For more information about scheduling volume backups, see Policy-Based Backups. For task-based procedures, see Managing Backup Policy Assignments to Volumes.

Enabling Cross-Region Replication for a Volume

The Block Volume service provides you with the capability to perform ongoing automatic asynchronous replication of block volumes and boot volumes to other regions for disaster recovery scenarios.

For task-basd procedures Using the Console. For more information about volume replication, see Replicating a Volume.