Allocating unused disk space to logical volumes

Last Updated : Jun 08, 2026 |

About this task

In rare circumstances, you might need to allocate free disk space to a specific disk volume to address unexpected disk engineering issues. Only use this procedure in these circumstances. For additional assistance, contact Avaya support.

Important:

You can only allocate free disk space to disk volumes if data encryption is disabled on Avaya Aura® Device Services. If data encryption is enabled, you cannot allocate free disk space.

Before you begin

  • Increase the size of the disk that hosts logical volumes. For example, if a logical volume requires an additional 20.0 GiB of space and the host disk is currently 50.0 GiB, then you must change the disk size to 70.0 GiB. For more information, see Increasing the virtual disk size of ESXi virtual machines and Increasing the virtual disk size of AWS virtual machines.

  • Since the allocation of disk space to a volume cannot be undone at the operating system level, create a snapshot of the virtual machine before performing the allocation procedure. If an error occurs during the procedure, reverting to the snapshot will restore the system to the point prior to where allocations were performed. After reverting to the snapshot, you can try to perform the allocation procedure again.

    Tip:

    To save system resources and maintain the performance of the virtual machine, delete the snapshot after the allocation procedure is completed successfully.

    On VMware ESXi, you can choose to exclude the virtual memory of the virtual machine from the snapshot. Therefore, the snapshot creation process will take less time. However, if the virtual memory is excluded from the snapshot, the state of the running application processes and other system processes is not preserved in the snapshot. Therefore, any runtime data will be lost when you revert to that snapshot. Avaya recommends that you shut down the application using the svc aads stop command before taking the snapshot. After you allocate disk space and delete the snapshot, start the application using the svc aads start command.

Procedure

  1. Log in to the virtual machine as an administrative user using an SSH connection.
  2. Run the following command to scan the disks on the virtual machine to detect available free space: 
    sys volmgt --scan

    This command scans the virtual disks of the system to detect a size increase. Then the command displays the file system summary, which includes the size and amount of free storage for each virtual disk, and the size and usage of the volumes hosted on these disks.

    In the following example, 50.00 GiB of free storage is available to be allocated to the volumes on disk 1.

                               Disk and Volume Summary

+----------- Disk ------------+------------------- Volume --------------------+
|                             |                      LVM        File System   |
| Num  Name     Size     Free |    Name              Size      Size     Usage |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
|  1   sda     124.51   50.10 | /                   17.30     17.29      1.56 |
|                             | /home                4.00      3.99      0.03 |
|                             | /opt/Avaya          14.70     14.69      2.04 |
|                             | /tmp                14.90     14.89      0.63 |
|                             | /var                 8.50      8.49      0.09 |
|                             | /var/log             5.00      4.99      0.03 |
|                             | /var/log/audit       6.00      5.99      0.03 |
|                             | swap                 4.00       n/a       n/a |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
|  2   sdb      70.00    0.00 | /var/log/Avaya      70.00     69.98      0.11 |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
|  3   sdc      40.00    0.00 | /media/data         40.00     39.99      0.55 |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
|  4   sdd      10.00    0.00 | /media/cassandra    10.00      9.99      0.03 |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
    Tip:

    • You can run the sys volmgt —h command to get basic information on command line syntax, and the sys volmgt –hh command for verbose help.

    • You can review summaries, such as the one above, at any time by running the sys volmgt ––summary command. This command does not scan disks for newly available unallocated storage. Use this command if you know that disk sizes have not been increased since the last summary was displayed.

  3. Run the following commands to allocate a specific amount of disk space to a volume: 
    sys volmgt ––extend <volume> <x>[m|g|t]

    In this command:

    • <volume> specifies the name of the volume that is displayed when you run either the sys volmgt ––summary or sys volmgt ––scan command.

    • <x> specifies amount of space. <x> is a decimal number.

    • m means megabytes.

    • g means gigabytes.

    • t means terabytes.

    For example, the following command allocates 10.5 GiB to the /var/log volume:

    sys volmgt ––extend /var/log 10.5g
  4. Run the following command to allocate all remaining disk space to a volume on the disk: 
    sys volmgt ––extend <volume> ––remaining

    All ––extend operations are run as background tasks.

    1. To monitor the status of the operation in progress or of the last completed operation, run one of the following commands: 
      sys volmgt --monitor
sys volmgt --monitor less

      The first command uses the tail browser to display the results. The second command uses the less browser to display the results.

    2. To gather all volume management logs into a .zip file in the current working directory, run the following command: 
      sys volmgt --logs
    3. If you suspect that the reported size of a file system is not correct, check if the operation is still in progress by running the following command: 
      sys volmgt --status
    4. If the status is reported as Complete, you can correct the situation by running --extend without an increment value: 
      sys volmgt --extend /var/log

      This operation does not add more space to the volume that hosts the file system. Instead, it reissues the command to make full use of the volume space. The file system expansion process is part of the original --extend operation, which is used to increase the volume size. However, in some cases, this operation might be interrupted and require the above command to re-initiate the expansion.