Updating Disk Properties in OCI
- Virgil Fritz Taneza
Updating the disk size, type and performance characteristics of disks in OCI involves modifying existing Oracle Block Volumes attached to the instance as disk devices. You can resize Oracle Block Volumes to increase their capacity or adjust performance characteristics.
In contrast with AWS, Azure and VMware where you can be able to edit the disk type and properties once it is provisioned via their respective web consoles, in OCI you can change the disk properties easily via SoftNAS UI for your convenience. You can also do the same disk options adjustment via the OCI portal.
In this guide, we will cover updating the Oracle Block Volume's properties using SoftNAS UI. If the settings desired to change are not presented as editable in SoftNAS UI, you can go directly into the OCI portal to do such changes which may not be covered in this guide.
Warning: Before proceeding, ensure that you have appropriate permissions to modify Virtual Machine and it’s attached Oracle BlockVolumes, and make sure to backup critical data to avoid data loss during the process.
When using SoftNAS, you can add Oracle Block Volumes and attach them to the instance as disks and create a Storage pool out of them. Storage pools are used to aggregate disk storage into a large pool of storage that can be conveniently allocated and shared by volumes.
Warning: To achieve optimal performance of a Storage Pool, SoftNAS recommends the use of disks of same types, sizes and performance characteristics. In existing Storage pools with varying disk types and sizes, SoftNAS recommends updating all the disk types to same type and performance characteristics and updating the disk sizes to a value greater than or equal to the largest disk size used by the pool. Some if not all of these configurations can be updated by changing the disk size, and the type of DataStore backing the virtual disk.
Here's a step-by-step guide on how to do this:
In this guide, we are using screenshots from SoftNAS StorageCenter UI.
1. Login to SoftNAS StorageCenter
Open a web browser and log in to your SoftNAS' StorageCenter UI. Make sure you have the necessary permissions to modify the block volume or disk settings. You can either use Instance Principal or User Principal as authentication method in doing stuff like creating and/or modifying disk properties.
2. Open Disk Devices Application
In the SoftNAS StorageCenter UI, navigate to the Storage->Disk Devices to view the list of attached Oracle Block Volumes as disk devices.
3. Select Desired Disk from the Grid and Click on Edit Device
From the list of attached Oracle Block Volumes as disk devices, you can select the desired disk and click Edit Device from the button menu right above the grid.
After selecting a disk device and clicking Edit Device button, a pop-up will appear showing the current disk device settings where you can change any desired options as below:
4. Update OCI Disk
Adjust disk options such as increasing the disk size, enabling auto-tune settings, and setting performance options in VPUs/GB. Once one changing the fields, click on Update OCI Disk button to perform the disk changes.
5. Update File System
If you are resizing/expanding the disk you may need to expand the filesystem using appropriate commands for your system.
5.1 Expand the Storage Pool Quota
If you are resizing/expanding the disk which is part of an existing SoftNAS Storage Pool, you need to expand the Storage Pool’s size and set new quota to 80% of the new Storage Pool’s size.
Here are the steps on how to update the Storage Pool’s quota:
5.1.1 Expand the device to use all available space
Expand the device to use all available space. If the device is part of a mirror or raidz then all devices must be expanded before the new space will become available to the Storage pool. Execute the command zpool online -e <pool name> <device name> as below:
Before expanding the device used by the pool, lets examine first the pool’s current size
root@SoftNAS:~# zpool get -p size nas_pool # get the pool's current size
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
nas_pool size 159987531776 - # size is around 149GB
as you can see, the pool’s current size is still 149GB which is the usable space of the pool composed of disks of sizes 64GB and 32GB.
Now, we can expand the device used by the pool as below:
root@SoftNAS:~# zpool online -e nas_pool oracleoci/oraclevdb # expand the pool's disk
root@SoftNAS:~# echo $? # check if command is successfull
0
root@SoftNAS:~# zpool get -p size nas_pool # check pool's new size
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
nas_pool size 213674622976 - # size is now around 199GB
root@SoftNAS:~#Get 80% of the pool’s new size and set it as the pool’s new quota.
# new_quota = 199GB * 0.80 = 159.2GB
root@SoftNAS:~# zfs set quota=159.2G nas_pool # set pool's new quota
root@SoftNAS:~# zfs get quota nas_pool # get pool's new quota
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
nas_pool quota 159G local # 159GB is the new quota rounding down 159.2GB
root@SoftNAS:~#6. Monitor and Test
After the modification is complete, monitor your system's performance to ensure it meets your expectations.