How To: Extend the PAM External Filestore

Summary

It's recommended to add an external disk to any PAM server that is configured for screen recording. On high-usage systems, the external disk can become full and removing older recordings and archives is not an option.

The steps in this article detail how to add extra disk space to an existing external disk on a PAM server.

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Applicable Versions

v7.2.x onwards (including v8 onwards)

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Pre-requisites

This article assumes the following:

• All snapshots of the PAM Server have been removed.
• The user account osirium_support has been enabled and a password set.
• A backup of the Osirium server and the external filestore has been taken and stored in line with your backup procedure.

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Extending the External Filestore Disk

The screenshots in this example extend the external disk /dev/sdb from 250GB to 500GB.

To expand an existing external filestore to the PAM Server:

1. Firstly, within the VMware Management Console, expand the external filestore disk being used by the PAM Server.

2. Using the PAM Server Console window, logon using the osirium_support account.

3. Check the physical size of the disk as seen by the operating system:

sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL

Note the external disk is showing as 250GB:

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4. If the physical disk size is not the increased size, then rescan the PAM Server to pick up the changes:

sudo sh -c "echo 1 > /sys/class/scsi_device/32\:0\:1\:0/device/rescan"

5. Recheck the operating system has recognised the physical disk size change by again running:

sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL

Now the disk shows as 500GB but the `external-external` partition is still 250GB:

6. Now resize the physical partition:

sudo pvresize --verbose /dev/sdb

7. Now extend the local volume to fill the new space:

sudo lvextend -l +100%FREE -r /dev/external/external

8. Check the disk and partitions again, they should now show the full size of the external disk used by the external-external partition:

sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL

This now shows:

9. Finally check the disk space should now show more free space:

df -h

This shows the new space:

It might take several minutes for the new sizes to show up in the Admin UI Files page.