Virtual Machines

When you’re running ESXI without vCenter, sometimes really niche things come up and you have situations that are kind of a pain without the appropriate management software so sometimes you gotta be a little janky.

• So Primarily you’re going to want to power off the VM you want to clone.

• Then you want to right click the VM and chose Edit Settings.

  • In the Virtual Hardware tab take not of the name and location of your Disk File.

• Next you’re going to open your Datastore Browser by going Storage and in the Datastores tab click the Datastore Browser button.

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So for some reason that Home Assistant OS virtual machine doesn’t really like being on certain versions of Vmware ESXI (typically older versions as I assume they do their testing as close to the newer releases as possible). I believe the issue stems from needing to change your virtual disk to IDE instead of SCSI which causes some underlying hard drive integrity issues that they didn’t plan for. Nonetheless, the fix is pretty easy and just takes a couple of minutes on your time and a Linux terminal (or any terminal that can SSH I guess).

The Problem#

When installing Ubuntu Server with the LVM option in the default partitioning options, it will often only use a fraction of the actual disk space you have available. Thankfully LVM is flexible enough to extend this partition without causing any huge issues to your operating system. In this writeup, I’m gonna extend a 15G volume to a 200G volume on my Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS VM.

user@ubuntu:~$ lsblk

NAME                      MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS

loop0                       7:0    0   55M  1 loop /snap/core18/1880

loop1                       7:1    0 55.7M  1 loop /snap/core18/2812

loop2                       7:2    0 63.9M  1 loop /snap/core20/2105

loop3                       7:3    0 74.1M  1 loop /snap/core22/1033

loop4                       7:4    0 71.3M  1 loop /snap/lxd/16099

loop5                       7:5    0 91.8M  1 loop /snap/lxd/24061

loop6                       7:6    0 40.9M  1 loop /snap/snapd/20290

sda                         8:0    0  200G  0 disk 

├─sda1                      8:1    0    1M  0 part 

├─sda2                      8:2    0    1G  0 part /boot

└─sda3                      8:3    0  199G  0 part 

  └─ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv 253:0    0   15G  0 lvm  /

sr0                        11:0    1  4.5G  0 rom  



user@ubuntu:~$ df -h

Filesystem                         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

tmpfs                              794M  1.7M  793M   1% /run

/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv   15G   14G  497M  97% /

tmpfs                              3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm

tmpfs                              5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock

/dev/sda2                          974M  223M  684M  25% /boot

tmpfs                              794M   16K  794M   1% /run/user/1000

The Fix#

First, let’s ensure that our physical volume is correctly sized, this command won’t really do much if it is, but ts worth running just to be sure.