How to add additional local storage to Xenserver 6.5 post install

At the tail end of last year I decided to run up a lab for testing Machine Creation Services using Xenserver 6.5 in preparation for a project I had in the pipeline. My lab is currently running vSphere 6 so I decided to nest a Xenserver 6.5 host inside the EXS host.

I quickly found that I required more local storage on the nested host to support my testing…

Here’s how to do it…

Select the Nested Host (VM) within vSphere / vCenter:

Edit the Virtual Machine and add an additional vDisk, in this case, I’ve added a 150GB as shown below:

Once the vDisk is added, reboot the VM (Nested Xenserver Host) then login to the Local Commad Shell:

By running ‘fdisk -l’ you will see all disks accessible by the host including the recently added, uninitialized volume.

Currently active (initialized) disks (sda, sdb & sdc):

Newly added disk (sdd):

NOTE, If this is the first drive you have added, it will likely enumerate as ‘sdb’ (Storage Device B). This is the 4th additional local disk I have added. I’ve still to confirm but I reckon that’s why I’ve got ‘sdd'(Storage Device D):

Now that the new disk is visible to Xenserver, it must be initialized so that can be used by Logical Volume Manager (LVM). Do this by running:

‘pvcreate /dev/sdd’

Remember! Your newly added volume will likely be ‘sdb’ opposed to ‘sdd’!

Once the disk has been initialized, we need to create a Xenserver Storage Repository so it can be used by the Xenserver Hypervisor:

‘xe sr-create type=lvm content-type=user device-config:device=/dev/sdb name-label=LS4′ 

I have chosen to label it ‘LS4’ (Local Storage 4) as it’s the fourth disk I have added.

The new, additional local volume should be visible within Xencenter within seconds:

The above process would work in a physical Xenserver host if more local disk was required but I reckon that would be an unlikely scenario… but who knows in this game…