Expanding the disk size on pfsense under VMWare ESXi

Question

I've been testing pfsense on ESXi for a while. And now I'm almost running out of space. Currently it holds around 30GB and I would like to expand it to 150GB as I'm planning on installing squid for caching. So far what I did is;

• Tried to expand the disk on ESXi for pfsense (its a thick provisioned drive) which expanded and showing as free.
• Tried gparted by booting and iso into the pfsense VM which showed that the installed partition is an unknown one & the unallocated didn't even show options to resize (guess it is because pfsense uses UFS file system)
• Tried installing a fresh copy which was successful but the UI was pretty strange as I couldn't see the total usage, memory usage.. etc.. not even the status bars properly.

My pfsense is making a lot of trouble. All I need is to expand the disk on the old pfsense if possible else a fix for the new one (where the GUI looks pretty sluggish).

Answer 1

pfSense is currently based on FreeBSD 8.x. The ability to grow a UFS filesystem live is only coming with FreeBSD 10.x, so all this should be done from a rescue/install mode.

First do a backup of your config.xml file !

To grow the pfSense root filesystem you must first properly re-size the BSD partition scheme (aka "bsd slices"):

• re-size the BSD partition

  On console mode or through ssh, start a Shell (example is only 4GB install with 4GB free disk):

  [admin]:gpart show

  =>      63  16777153  ad0  MBR  (8.0G)
          63   8388513    1  freebsd  [active]  (4G)
     8388576   8388640       - free -  (4.0G)
  
  =>      0  8388513  ad0s1  BSD  (4G)
          0       16         - free -  (8.0k)
         16  7339921      1  freebsd-ufs  (3.5G)
    7339937  1048576      2  freebsd-swap  (512M)
  

  (assuming your disk is seen as ad0)

  [admin]:gpart resize -i 1 ad0

  ad0s1 resized
  

  Due to a bug in gpart regarding the old MBR partitioning schemes, we need to force a global size update, as the MBR is still having the old global size.

  Get the freebsd real partition size (2nd column of the gpart show ad0 output):

  [admin]:gpart show ad0

  =>      63  16777153  ad0  MBR  (8.0G)
          63  16777152    1  freebsd  [active]  (8G)
    16777215         1       - free -  (512B)
  

  Using bsdlabel to edit this value onto the zise of c: line:

  [admin]:bsdlabel -e /dev/ad0s1

  # /dev/ad0s1:
  8 partitions:
  #          size     offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
    a:   15728640         16    4.2BSD        0     0     0
    b:    1048496   15728656      swap
    c:    8388513          0    unused        0     0     # "raw" part, don't edit
  

  So edit it to match this number; in our example: 16777152 (editor is vi):

  # /dev/ad0s1:
  8 partitions:
  #          size     offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
    a:   15728640         16    4.2BSD        0     0     0
    b:    1048496   15728656      swap
    c:   16777152          0    unused        0     0     # "raw" part, don't edit`
  

  The partitions have now been re-sized properly.

• Growing pfSense root filesystem

  As the default disk partioning is setting a swap at the end of the disk, we must first note down its size and remove it before growing the root filesystem:

  (Just be sure it the 2nd filesystem of your ad0s1 - 3rd column value in gpart show output)

  [admin]:gpart delete -i 2 ad0s1

  Re-sizing our root partition to all, but the swap partition size (gpart -s option do accept only integer values, so 7.5G = 7680M):

  [admin]:gpart resize -i 1 -s 7680M ad0s1

  ad0s1a resized
  

  [admin]:growfs /dev/ad0s1a

  We strongly recommend you to make a backup before growing the Filesystem
  
   Did you backup your data (Yes/No) ? Yes
  new file systemsize is: 3932160 frags
  Warning: 302144 sector(s) cannot be allocated.
  growfs: 7532.5MB (15426496 sectors) block size 16384, fragment size 2048
          using 41 cylinder groups of 183.72MB, 11758 blks, 23552 inodes.
  super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
   7525280, 7901536, 8277792, 8654048, 9030304, 9406560, 9782816, 10159072, 10535328, 10911584,
   11287840, 11664096, 12040352, 12416608, 12792864, 13169120, 13545376, 13921632, 14297888,
   14674144, 15050400
  

  And re-creating the swap partition:

  [admin]:gpart add -t freebsd-swap ad0s1

  ad0s1b added
  

  Done. Our partition table is now as follow and the root filesystem has been properly expanded to use its full partition:

  [admin]:gpart show

  =>      63  16777153  ad0  MBR  (8.0G)
          63  16777152    1  freebsd  [active]  (8G)
    16777215         1       - free -  (512B)
  
  =>       0  16777152  ad0s1  BSD  (8G)
           0        16         - free -  (8.0k)
          16  15728640      1  freebsd-ufs  (7.5G)
    15728656   1048496      2  freebsd-swap  (512M)
  

For more information about FreeBSD gpart and growfs commands:

• growfs manual (FreeBSD 8.3)
• gpart manual (FreeBSD 8.3)

Note: gpart bug regarding the old MBR partitioning scheme is still true as of FreeBSD-10.0.